the people in-creases.
The prestige of the editorial is gone. Just as there is a party in
England who propose the omission of the sermon from the church service
as something no longer needed by the people, so there are journalists
who think the time is at hand for the abolition of editorials, and the
concentration of the whole force of journalism upon presenting to the
public the history and picture of the day. The time for this has not
come, and may never come; but our journalists already know that
editorials neither make nor mar a daily paper, that they do not much
influence the public mind, nor change many votes, and that the power
and success of a newspaper depend finally upon its success in getting
and its skill in exhibiting the news. The word _newspaper_ is the
exact and complete description of the thing which the true journalist
aims to produce. The news is his work; editorials are his play. The
news is the point of rivalry; it is that for which nineteen twentieths
of the people buy newspapers; it is that which constitutes the power
and value of the daily press; it is that which determines the rank of
every newspaper in every free country.

No editor, therefore, will ever reign over the United States, and the
newspapers of no one city will attain universal currency. Hence the
importance of journalism in the United States. By the time a town has
ten thousand inhabitants, it usually has a daily paper, and in most
large cities there is a daily paper for every twenty thousand people.
In many of the Western cities there are daily newspapers conducted
with great energy, and on a scale of expenditure which enables them to
approximate real excellence. Many of our readers will live to see the
day when there will be in Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, Cincinnati,
and San Francisco daily newspapers more complete, better executed, and
produced at greater expense than any newspaper now existing in the
United States. This is a great deal to say, in view of the fact, that,
during the late war, one of the New York papers expended in war
correspondence alone two thousand dollars a week. Nevertheless, we
believe it. There will never be _two_ newspapers in any one city that
can sustain such an expenditure, but in fifteen years from, to-day
there will be one, we think, in each of our great cities, and besides
that one there will be four or five struggling to supplant it, as well
as one or two having humbler aims and content with a