Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/269

Rh He was said to be a young man of fine intellectual powers and was a prolific contributor to the current magazines of that time; he died of cholera in 1832 and his paper did not survive him.

Shortly after Conwell's time, an attempt was made in Boston to publish a one-cent paper called The Bostonian, but this, too, failed. Following this came the Morning Post in New York, January 1, 1833, notable principally for the fact that in this particular experiment Horace Greeley, the ambitious young printer, had an interest. The Post, however, was not really a penny paper, and its projectors, whose capital did not exceed two hundred dollars, ascribed their failure to the fact that the price—two cents—was too high. After a week's experiment, the price was reduced to one cent and, at the end of three weeks, the Morning Post died.

To this paper, however, was given the credit of inspiring the publication, in the following fall, of the New York Sun, the first permanent penny paper. On the other hand, it must be remembered that, since 1830, the illustrated penny magazine of London had been circulated in. New York and other American cities and sold in large quantities. The experiments in Boston and Philadelphia had also attracted attention and discussion among printers. These printers and compositors were an intelligent body of men, seeking always to benefit their condition and studiously alive to the new ideas with which the country was then teeming.

With the founding of the New York Sun, we come to consider the history of great popular institutions. Older newspapers came to have something of the same influence as the Sun, notably the Evening Post, under Bryant and later under Godkin. But the Sun was the first popular paper; its story, as Mr. Edward P. Mitchell