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 Rise of Metropolitan Journalism 46 1 societies at their annual meetings. The good men and women at first regarded the reporter as a veritable serpent in the garden and sought to expel and exclude him, but they soon became reconciled to his presence. In the fourth place, Bennett's editorial comments were always in the shape of short paragraphs filled with a strange but very read- able mixture of common sense and impudence. In one of the first numbers he said : " The New York and Erie Railroad is to break ground in a few days. VVe hope they will break nothing else." This sarcasm was prophetic enough to make a reputation for any oracle. Again, the Presbyterian denomination was covered with the dust of a ponderous doctrinal controversy between Old School and New School. Bennett put the whole altercation under his micro- scope with a quiet remark which scarcely concealed the size of his chuckle : " Great trouble among the Presbyterians just now. The question in dispute is whether or not a man can do anything towards saving his own soul." At another time he referred to "the holy Roman Catholic Church," adding in a parenthesis "all of us Cath- olics are devilish holy." In 1840 when Bishop Hughes and Gov- ernor Seward tried to get public money for Catholic schools and thereby caused the formation of the Native American party, Ben- nett and the Herald were violent opponents of the Bishop's schemes, and Bennett said that his Reverence was trying to organize his church into a political club. The public had no appetite for the long-winded essays by " Publius " and " Honestus " and " Veritas " in the stately blanket sheets, when it could feed on such crisp criti- cism as this. In the fifth place, Mr. Bennett's newspaper was quite emanci- pated also from the accepted standards of conventionality, one might almost say of ethics. He knew better than any of his rivals the pecuniary value of wholesale advertisement and his cold-blooded manner of translating notoriety into dollars and cents shocked the chivalrous soul of James Watson Webb. According to Webb's catechism gentlemen whose statements were too sharply criticized or whose motives were impugned could discover a healing balm only in an invitation to shed blood. Bennett laughed at such con- duct and laughed also at such provocations. Every attack upon him was duly chronicled in the Herald and made a fresh means for exalting the horn of the newspaper and for extending its circulation. Bennett was assaulted on the street and in his office by those whom he censured and lampooned. Infernal machines were sent to blow him into atoms. Bennett answered with blows of ridicule and the public laughed with him and swelled the revenues of the Herald VOL. VI. — 31.