Births, Marriages, and Deaths. 685 heads all those of prominence in any community that have met with any of these incidents or accidents. James Grant tells a story of the origin of the custom of requiring payment for the insertion of marriage announcements in the London Times. They were published gratuitously in all the English papers till then. So were the announcements of deaths. The same custom prevailed in the United States. It appears to have been the early practice of the Times, in announcing a marriage, to state the amount of the bride's dowry-£20,000 or £30,000, whatever it might happen to be. One morning at breakfast Mr. Walter threw out the suggestion that if a man married all that money he might certainly pay a trifling percentage upon it to the printer for acquainting the world with the fact. "These marriage fees would form a nice little pocket-money for me, my dear," added Mrs. Walter, and, as a joke, her husband agreed to try the experiment. The charge at first was but a trifle, and the annual amount probably not much; but Mrs. Walter, at her death, passed this prescriptive right to her daughter, and when, a few years ago, the right was repurchased by the present proprietor, it was assessed at £4000 or £5000. Our papers formerly published these announcements as interesting items of domestic news. Mr. Bennett, of the Herald, first made the change in this country. Now the income from this source alone to that paper is not far from $30,000 per annum. There is rarely less than a column daily of marriage and obituary notices in the Herald. "No cards" has become a familiar announcement in the marriage notices of newspapers. Several years ago, about 1865, a lady and gentleman were married in New York. They were quietly united in the bonds of matrimony. They had many friends and acquaintances. Not wishing any display, and not wishing to have it appear that they had slighted any one, the gentleman, in having the announcement of the marriage inserted in the Herald, added “No cards" to the notice. These cabalistic words, on the morning of their publication, puzzled the fashionable world. "No cards! What does that mean?" asked every one. Their inventor was famous for nine days in Gotham. But now a large number of the daily marriage announcements, to the disgust of the card engravers, have these words as the "amen" of the ceremony. The Sun, too, has its platform for 1872. It lays down the issues of the campaign in these six paragraphs: I. One term of office for the President, and no more; the Constitution to be amended to secure this reform. II. Both Grantism and Tweedism to be abolished in national affairs by laws for the summary punishment of present-taking and bribe-taking as well as of public robbery. III. Universal amnesty and restoration of political rights to all persons concerned in the late rebellion. IV. Reform in the Civil Service, so that appointment to office will no longer depend on party patronage, and can not be used as a means of corrupting the politics of the country and perpetuating unworthy men in high places; and so that the President can not appoint his own relations or those of his wife to any office whatever. V. Reform of the revenue; reduction in the number of revenue officers and the expenses of collecting duties and taxes; fixed salaries for all revenue officers; the abolition of import duties on all the necessaries of life, and the reduction of other duties to a consistent, rational, and moderate system; the abolition of unconstitutional and superfluous internal taxes, leaving only stamps, tobacco, and distilled spirits as the subjects of such taxation. VI. Legislation to prevent the levy of blackmail upon clerks and other public officers for party political purposes, and for the summary punishment alike of those who demand and those who pay such contributions. Consistent with the above, the Sun made serious charges against Secretary Robeson, of the Navy Department, and was so persistent in them as to call forth the following summons: Forty-second Congress U. S., House of Representatives, SIR, I am instructed to notify you that in pursuance of the terms of the inclosed resolution adopted by the House of Representatives on the 11th instant, the committee appointed in accordance therewith are now ready to receive any communication that you may desire to make in support of the charges appearing in the New York Sun, of which you are understood to be the responsible editor, against the Hon. George M. Robeson, Secretary of the Navy. The committee will be glad either to have you appear before them and make any statements likely to lead to a full discovery of all the facts, or to receive information from you or any of your associates in any way most convenient for you. The committee will be ready to subpoena any witnesses you may name, and to give a full hearing of the entire case, and have for that purpose adjourned to Thursday next, the 21st instant, at 10 o'clock, A.M., from which time they desire to proceed with the investigation as fast as possible. I am very respectfully yours, HENRY H. SMITH, Clerk of Select Committee, etc. How did not the Sun meet this letter? That "of course we shall appear before the committee," which is responsible journalism in a few words. The Sun is now entered for the race of newspapers for the next ten years. While it has the advantage in price for circulation, it has the disadvantage in size for news and advertisements. It is at the head of a class of newspapers. Of this class there are the Star, the Witness, the Mail, the Telegram, in New York; the Herald and the Times in Boston; the Public Ledger and the Post in Philadelphia. They occupy the same position in 1872 to the Tribune, the Herald, the Times, and the World, in New York, that the Herald, Tribune, and Sun did in 1842 to the Courier and Enquirer, Journal of Commerce, and New York Express, but only in cheapness. The Tribune and Herald, in 1842, were the cheap, energetic Press at two cents per copy. The Courier and Enquirer and the Journal of Commerce were the dear, heavy newspapers at six cents per copy. The Sun and Star, in 1872, are the two-cent papers, and the Herald, World, Tribune, and Times are double that price. But-and there is as much virtue in this but as in an if the high-priced newspapers of to-day, all things considered, are as cheap as the low-priced journals; Circulation of the New York Papers. 687 and then the age is an electric one. All are high-strung like the telegraphic wires. So long, therefore, as the Tribune, and Herald, and their class keep up their enterprise, they are safe from any inroads from their competitors. In closing our sketch of the Sun the subjoined statement of one year's sale of newspapers in the metropolis comes in very appropriately. It is the return of the Assistant Assessor of the gross receipts from the sales of the various New York newspapers in 1869. Each return is in excess of $1250 per quarter allowed by law: The New York Citizen and Round Table, consolidated during the last quarter, made a return of $8023. Within the last six months the Clipper and the Franco-American removed from the district. If we look back to 1833, when the Sun was started, we find that the total number of copies of all the papers printed in New York City was 6,000,000 to 8,000,000 in that year, valued then at $400,000 or $500,000. The total sales in 1869 reached the enormous sum of 7,000,000. It is probable that, against the 8,000,000 copies issued. in 1833, the number in 1869 came up to 150,000,000 to 200,000,000, almost twice as many copies as were issued in the whole country in the year that the first penny paper made its appearance. It is to be considered, in analyzing this table, that the sums mentioned there do not include the receipts from advertisements except in the returns of the World, the proprietor of which, it is mentioned, made a mistake in one or two quarters, and returned his total receipts. But this inadvertence is not sufficient to change the wonderful aggregate result of the statement. CHAPTER XLIV. THE COMIC PAPERS. THEIR FAILURE IN THE UNITED STATES AND SUCCESS IN EUROPE. — The CAUSE. WIT AND HUMOR HERE AND ELSEWHERE.-MARK TWAIN ON ARTEMUS WARD.-INTERVIEW WITH PETROLEUM V. NASBY.-WHAT ONE HUMORIST SAYS OF ANOTHER.-ABUNDANCE OF WIT IN AMERICA. Quid rides? While comic journalism, per se, does not thrive in the United States, we have plenty of comic writers and talkers, who have grown fat, made money, set the nation in a roar, and thrown Momus into ecstasies of delight over the fresh, free, funny, and broad humor of our numerous raconteurs, and wits, and punsters. One of the earliest writers in this special department of our literature was the original Joe Strickland, whose productions were short and witty. They were written by George W. Arnold, who kept a lottery office in Broadway, New York, and graced the newspapers in 1826, '27, and '28. The Croaker papers of Drake and Halleck were also full of points. Seba Smith, of Portland, Maine, then wrote the queer and quaint letters of Major Jack Downing, of Downingsville. They had their sensation in their day. Andrew Jackson was in the height of his popularity at that time, and he was the subject of these epistles. Charles Augustus Davis, of New York, was Jack Downing the second. Then Judge Halliburton came out with Sam Slick of Slickville. He was a Nova Scotian, it is true, but his droll sketches and humor belong to the Western Hemisphere. Then Joseph C. Neale, an editor in Philadelphia-not John Neal, of Portland-"not this man, but that”—appeared with his curious "Charcoal Sketches," and created some pleasure and merriment. Then such wits as Prentice, Greene, Bennett, Lewis Gaylord Clarke, John Waters, Kendall, Felix Merry, Henry J. Finn, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lumsden, Cornelius Matthews, and Briggs came before the footlights of our continental theatre. There was a lithographer, named Robinson, who lined the curbstones and covered the old fences of New York with his peculiarly characteristic caricatures during Jackson's and Van Buren's administrations, which frequently produced a broad grin on the face of the metropolis in those days. Since that period a number of humorists and wits of purely native growth have become well known throughout the land. Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, John Phoenix, Doe. sticks, Josh Billings, Bret Harte, Petroleum V. Nasby, who seems to be a descendant of Jack Downing, Leland, Wilkins, Congdon, and Mrs. Partington, in their real names and in noms des plumes, have introduced a new order of comic literature, which, for quaintness, and richness, and freshness, is a feature of the times. Still later, Orpheus C. Kerr, Captain Watt A. Lyre, Yuba Dam, Eli Perkins, Oofty Koofty, Will M. Carleton, M. T. Jugg, and Si Slokum have turned up in the fertile soil of the East and West. Humor is a specialty with them; yet none of these writers, nor all of them combined, have been able to establish and keep in prosperous existence a publication like Punch for a single year. Our people don't want their wit on a separate dish. These wits and humorists write when the spirit moves them. No one can always be funny. Weekly drafts, like a run upon a bank, tend to exhaust them. Specie payments would cease at the treasury of wit. Nickel would take the place of silver and gold, and we should no longer hear the real ring of the true metal. There must be variety in wit; one style is not sufficient for Americans. Wit, and humor, and fun are spontaneous productions in the United States, and effervesce and bubble up like the oil-wells of Pennsylvania; they are as rich and golden as the mines in California-indeed, no crowd is without its wit, no riot without its jest ; there is a laugh in every street. America is filled with Tom Hoods to keep the Niagara in a roar. They find no vent in special publications; their safety-valves are in the regular weekly and daily papers. Each newspaper has one or more. Some of the leading editorial articles sparkle with wit as a duchess does with diamonds. No single publication, like Judy, Vanity Fair, Yankee Doodle, Lantern, Puck, or Fun, answer the needs of this country. Wit can not be measured off like tape, or kept on hand for a week; it would spoil in that time. Hence the failure of such papers in New York. Thus, while London generously sustains a publication like Punch, Paris laughs over the real hits of Charivari and nineteen or twenty other comic papers; while Germany enjoys her lager bier with the Kladderadatsch and more than thirty other humorous journals, with a circulation of three hundred thousand copies, Italy eats her maccaroni with her illustrated fun for seasoning, and Spain, with her cheap and slovenly journalism, has her bull-fights, with her comic publications printed in large type, with illustrations done in chalk. Australia, too, has not been able to make her rapid progress in gold and glory without a Punch, in imitation of the original in London, and full of smartness and wit. But the United States lives, and breathes, and prospers, builds the longest railroads, and suppresses |