Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/145

 ges had

increased from six dollars to eight and nine; salaries of clerks and collectors had risen from three hundred and three hundred and fifty to four hundred and five hundred dollars a year. The item of paper, in quality and size, amounted in its blank state to more than one half of the proceeds of all subscriptions. Type had risen twenty-five per cent and all other materials in about the same proportion. Attention was called that these items including that of labor required prompt payment, while news- papers gave more extensive credit than was allowed in any other business "an evil sorely felt by the proprietors." While The Evening Post admitted that subscriptions in amount had quad- rupled, it asserted that they were not sufficient to support a newspaper establishment, and frequently confessed that it was the advertisers who provided the paper for the subscribers, and went so far as to say that without a very extensive advertising support, a publisher of a newspaper received less reward for his labor than the humblest mechanic. While the subscription rates were scheduled for a raise, those of advertising remained the same as before.

The scheme did not work out as planned. The Evening Post, in a column and a half editorial in its issue for December 9, expressed surprise that both The Mercantile Advertiser and The New-York Gazette had receded from the project which they had stood pledged to support and that The Morning Chronicle had declined to come into the measure, not because the price of sub- scriptions was high enough, but because, being the youngest establishment in the city, it was not prepared to encounter shock of the loss of subscribers. The same editorial in The Post denied that there had been any improper combination among the printers. The previous price of The Evening Post had been eight dollars per year to city subscribers and nine dollars to country subscribers.

PARTY SUPPORT OF PRESS

During the era of the party organ, not only the politicians but also the voters were expected to subscribe to the paper which supported partisan principles, regardless of the represen- tative merit of such publications. Occasionally, a paper of the