small leaves is,
that the size can be varied according to the demands of advertisements
or news (if the German papers ever find out what that is); so that the
publisher is always giving, every day, just what it pays to give that
day; and the reader has his regular quantity of reading matter, and does
not have to pay for advertising space, which in journals of unchangeable
form cannot always be used profitably. This little journal was started
something like twenty years ago. It probably spends little for news, has
only one or, at most, two editors, is crowded with advertisements, which
are inserted cheap, and costs, delivered, a little over six francs a
year. It circulates in the city some thirty-five thousand. There is
another little paper here of the same size, but not so many leaves,
called "The Daily Advertiser," with nothing but advertisements,
principally of theaters, concerts, and the daily sights, and one page
devoted to some prodigious yarn, generally concerning America, of
which country its readers must get the most extraordinary and frightful
impression. The "Nachrichten" made the fortune of its first owner, who
built himself a fine house out of it, and retired to enjoy his wealth.
It was recently sold for one hundred thousand guldens; and I can see
that it is piling up another fortune for its present owner. The Germans,
who herein show their good sense and the high state of civilization
to which they have reached, are very free advertisers, going to the
newspapers with all their wants, and finding in them that aid which all
interests and all sorts of people, from kaiser to kerl, are compelled,
in these days, to seek in the daily journal. Every German town of any
size has three or four of these little journals of flying leaves, which
are excellent papers in every respect, except that they look like badly
printed handbills, and have very little news and no editorials worth
speaking of. An exception to these in Bavaria is the "Allgerneine
Zeitung" of Augsburg, which is old and immensely respectable, and is
perhaps, for extent of correspondence and splendidly written editorials
on a great variety of topics, excelled by no journal in Europe except
the London "Times." It gives out two editions daily, the evening one
about the size of the New York "Nation;" and it has all the telegraphic
news. It is absurdly old-grannyish, and is malevolent in its pretended
conservatism and impartiality. Yet it circulates over forty t