Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/110

84 Loyalist cause, and Mein undertook the abuse of the Whig leaders in Boston. The result was that public indignation was so thoroughly aroused against him that he was obliged to leave the colony, sailing for England in 1769. Very shortly after the Chronicle began to fall away, even with the bolstering-up that the Colonial Governor gave it, and it was discontinued in 1770.

The endeavor to reach those who were not as yet interested in the newspapers led Zechariah Fowle and Isaiah Thomas to bring out the Massachusetts Spy, August 7, 1770. "It was calculated," says Thomas, "to obtain subscriptions from mechanics and other classes of people who had not much time to spare from business." Three issues a week were planned and the first number was scattered free throughout the town. The venture, however, was premature, and at the end of a month the noble design succumbed.

The following year Thomas brought out a paper of the same name, with the announcement that it was "open to all parties, but influenced by none." In two years, he says, his paper had the largest circulation in New England. At first the Tories contributed a few essays, but its Whig leanings were evident, and it soon became an outspoken supporter of the Liberty cause.

The Loyalists gave warning in 1774 that, in the event of an outbreak, not only the leaders of the patriots but “those trumpeters of sedition, the printers, Edes and Gill and Thomas” would be properly punished.

Thomas, who was the sole controlling factor in his own paper, was much more vehement than Edes and Gill, who allowed the more scholarly writers to control their policy; Thomas was trying to arouse the laboring