people into any other
occupation or profession. To make a living, and to have a career, is the
original incentive in all cases. Even in purely philanthropical
enterprises the driving-wheel that keeps them in motion for any length of
time is the salary paid the working members. So powerful is this
incentive that sometimes the wheel will continue to turn round when there
is no grist to grind. It sometimes happens that the friction of the
philanthropic machinery is so great that but very little power is
transmitted to the object for which the machinery was made. I knew a
devoted agent of the American Colonization Society, who, for several
years, collected in Connecticut just enough, for the cause, to buy his
clothes, and pay his board at a good hotel.

It is scarcely necessary to say, except to prevent a possible
misapprehension, that the editor who has no high ideals, no intention of
benefiting his fellow-men by his newspaper, and uses it unscrupulously as
a means of money-making only, sinks to the level of the physician and the
lawyer who have no higher conception of their callings than that they
offer opportunities for getting money by appeals to credulity, and by
assisting in evasions of the law.

If the excellence of a newspaper is not always measured by its
profitableness, it is generally true that, if it does not pay its owner,
it is valueless to the public. Not all newspapers which make money are
good, for some succeed by catering to the lowest tastes of respectable
people, and to the prejudice, ignorance, and passion of the lowest class;
but, as a rule, the successful journal pecuniarily is the best journal.
The reasons for this are on the surface. The impecunious newspaper cannot
give its readers promptly the news, nor able discussion of the news, and,
still worse, it cannot be independent. The political journal that relies
for support upon drippings of party favor or patronage, the general
newspaper that finds it necessary to existence to manipulate stock
reports, the religious weekly that draws precarious support from puffing
doubtful enterprises, the literary paper that depends upon the approval
of publishers, are poor affairs, and, in the long run or short run, come
to grief. Some newspapers do succeed by sensationalism, as some preachers
do; by a kind of quackery, as some doctors do; by trimming and shifting
to any momentary popular prejudice, as some politicians do; by becoming
the paid advocate of a perso