egraph, the rest of it by mail.
Every paragraph has the side-head, "London," "Vienna," or some other
town, and a date. And always, before the name of the town, is placed
a letter or a sign, to indicate who the correspondent is, so that the
authorities can find him when they want to hang him. Stars, crosses,
triangles, squares, half-moons, suns--such are some of the signs used by
correspondents.
Some of the dailies move too fast, others too slowly. For instance, my
Heidelberg daily was always twenty-four hours old when it arrived at
the hotel; but one of my Munich evening papers used to come a full
twenty-four hours before it was due.
Some of the less important dailies give one a tablespoonful of a
continued story every day; it is strung across the bottom of the page,
in the French fashion. By subscribing for the paper for five years I
judge that a man might succeed in getting pretty much all of the story.
If you ask a citizen of Munich which is the best Munich daily journal,
he will always tell you that there is only one good Munich daily, and
that it is published in Augsburg, forty or fifty miles away. It is like
saying that the best daily paper in New York is published out in New
Jersey somewhere. Yes, the Augsburg ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG is "the best
Munich paper," and it is the one I had in my mind when I was describing
a "first-class German daily" above. The entire paper, opened out, is not
quite as large as a single page of the New York HERALD. It is printed on
both sides, of course; but in such large type that its entire contents
could be put, in HERALD type, upon a single page of the HERALD--and
there would still be room enough on the page for the ZEITUNG's
"supplement" and some portion of the ZEITUNG's next day's contents.
Such is the first-class daily. The dailies actually printed in Munich
are all called second-class by the public. If you ask which is the best
of these second-class papers they say there is no difference; one is as
good as another. I have preserved a copy of one of them; it is
called the MUeNCHENER TAGES-ANZEIGER, and bears date January 25, 1879.
Comparisons are odious, but they need not be malicious; and without any
malice I wish to compare this journal, published in a German city of
170,000 inhabitants, with journals of other countries. I know of no
other way to enable the reader to "size" the thing.
A column of an average daily paper in America contains from 1,800 to
2,500 words; the r
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