Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/279

Rh "The public welfare has higher claims than any party cry.

"Grace and purity of style are always desirable, but never allow rhetoric to displace clear, direct, forcible expression.

"Plain words are essential for unlearned people, and these are just as plain to the most accomplished."

These three papers, the Sun in New York, the Ledger in Philadelphia, and the Sun in Baltimore, were products of a developing democracy. In turn they stood very stiffly for the democracy that had incubated them.

In the first years of penny journalism a reference during a congressional debate to the penny papers and their circulation brought forth an interesting defense of the new institution. A Congressman named Botts had declared, in an attack on the practice of giving government advertisements to the penny press, that they had "little or no circulation beyond the limits of the city from which they were published." To this the Sun made answer that its circulation was 30,000 in New York, Brooklyn, and Jersey City and 5,000 more without the city. The combined circulation of the Boston Times, the New York Sun, the Philadelphia Ledger, and the Baltimore Sun was put down as 96,000 copies; and the only places where the papers had not circulated, it was admitted, was in far-off farms and villages. In addition to this, it was claimed in their behalf that they had, in six years, accomplished more reforms than the party press had in twenty. They had rid Philadelphia of mobs, attacked the monopolies of the banks and profiteers in flour and beef, and had started a discussion tending to reform the debased currency system.

Politically, the penny press taught the higher priced