Part 5

"No," was the inevitable reply, upon receiving which he left without a word. Mr. Greeley chuckled as he told the reception given him at the office of the Journal of Commerce, a newspaper he was destined to contend with for many a year in the columns of the Tribune.

"Do you want a hand?" he said to David Hale, one of the owners of the paper.

Mr. Hale looked at him from head to foot, and then said:

"My opinion is, young man, that you're a runaway apprentice, and you'd better go home to your master."

The applicant tried to explain, but the busy proprietor merely replied:

"Be off about your business, and don't bother us."

The young man laughed good-humouredly and resumed his walk. He went to bed Saturday night thoroughly tired and a little discouraged. On Sunday he walked three miles to attend a church, and remembered to the end of his days the delight he had, for the first time in his life, in hearing a sermon that he entirely agreed with. In the meantime he had gained the good will of his landlord and the boarders, and to that circumstance he owed his first chance in the city. His landlord mentioned his fruitless search for work to an acquaintance who happened to call that Sunday afternoon. That acquaintance, who was a shoemaker, had accidently heard that printers were wanted at No. 85 Chatham Street.

At half-past five on Monday morning Horace Greeley stood before the designated house, and discovered the sign, "West's Printing Office," over the second story, the ground floor being occupied as a bookstore. Not a soul was stirring up stairs or down. The doors were locked, and Horace sat down on the steps to wait. Thousands of workmen passed by; but it was nearly seven before the first of Mr. West's printers arrived, and he, too, finding the door locked, sat down by the side of the stranger, and entered into conversation with him.

"I saw," said the printer to me many years after, "that he was an honest, good young man, and being a Vermonter myself, I determined to help him if I could."

Thus, a second time in New York already, the native quality of the man gained him, at the critical moment, the advantage that decided his destiny. His new friend did help him, and it was very much through his urgent recommendation that the foreman of the printing office gave him a chance. The foreman did not in the least believe that the green-looking young fellow before him could set in type one page of the polyglot Testament for which help was needed.

"Fix up a case for him," said he, "and we'll see if he can do anything."

Horace worked all day with silent intensity, and when he showed to the foreman at night a printer's proof of his day's work, it was found to be the best day's work that had yet been done on that most difficult job. It was greater in quantity and much more correct. The battle was won. He worked on the Testament for several months, making long hours and earning only moderate wages, saving all his surplus money, and sending the greater part of it to his father, who was still in debt for his farm and not sure of being able to keep it.

Ten years passed. Horace Greeley from journeyman printer made his way slowly to partnership in a small printing office. He founded the New Yorker, a weekly paper, the best periodical of its class in the United States. It brought him great credit and no profit.

In 1840, when General Harrison was nominated for the Presidency against Martin Van Buren, his feelings as a politician were deeply stirred, and he started a little campaign paper called The Log-Cabin, which was incomparably the most spirited thing of the kind ever published in the United States. It had a circulation of unprecedented extent, beginning with forty-eight thousand, and rising week after week until it reached ninety thousand. The price, however, was so low that its great sale proved rather an embarrassment than a benefit to the proprietors, and when the campaign ended the firm of Horace Greeley & Co. was rather more in debt than it was when the first number of The Log-Cabin was published.

The little paper had given the editor two things which go far toward making a success in business: great reputation and some confidence in himself. The first penny paper had been started. The New York Herald was making a great stir. The Sun was already a profitable sheet. And now the idea occurred to Horace Greeley to start a daily paper which should have the merits of cheapness and abundant news, without some of the qualities possessed by the others. He wished to found a cheap daily paper that should be good and salutary as well as interesting. The last number of The Log-Cabin announced the forthcoming Tribune, price one cent.

The editor was probably not solvent when he conceived the scheme, and he borrowed a thousand dollars of his old friend, James Coggeshall, with which to buy the indispensable material. He began with six hundred subscribers, printed five thousand of the first number, and found it difficult to give them all away. The Tribune appeared on the day set apart in New York for the funeral procession in commemoration of President Harrison, who died a month after his inauguration.

It was a chilly, dismal day in April, and all the town was absorbed in the imposing pageant. The receipts during the first week were ninety-two dollars; the expenses five hundred and twenty-five. But the little paper soon caught public attention, and the circulation increased for three weeks at the rate of about three hundred a day. It began its fourth week with six thousand; its seventh week with eleven thousand. The first number contained four columns of advertisements; the twelfth, nine columns; the hundredth, thirteen columns.

In a word, the success of the paper was immediate and very great. It grew a little faster than the machinery for producing it could be provided. Its success was due chiefly to the fact that the original idea of the editor was actually carried out. He aimed to produce a paper which should morally benefit the public. It was not always right, but it always meant to be.

CHARLES DICKENS

(1812-1870)

THE FACTORY BOY

This factory boy felt in his heart that he was qualified for a better position in life, and great was his humiliation at the wretched meanness of his surroundings. But his demeanor must have been admirable, for he succeeded not only in retaining the respect of his associates, but also in winning their regard. In his case, as in that of so many others, it was darkest just before the dawn of a better day.

They are his own words which follow:

An autobiographical fragment from Forster's "Life."

In an evil hour for me, as I often bitterly thought . . . James Lamert, who had lived with us in Bayham Street, seeing how I was employed from day to day, and knowing what our domestic circumstances then were, proposed that I should go into the blacking warehouse, to be as useful as I could, at a salary, I think, of six shillings a week. I am not clear whether it was six or seven. I am inclined to believe, from my uncertainty on this head, that it was six at first, and seven afterward. At any rate, the offer was accepted very willingly by my father and mother, and on a Monday morning I went down to the blacking warehouse to begin my business life.

It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me--a child of singular abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally--to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have been more so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a grammar school, and going to Cambridge.

Our relative had kindly arranged to teach me something in the dinner-hour, from twelve to one, I think it was, every day. But an arrangement so incompatible with counting-house business soon died away, from no fault of his or mine; and for the same reason, my small work-table, and my grosses of pots, my papers, string, scissors, paste-pot, and labels, by little and little, vanished out of the recess in the counting-house, and kept company with the other small work-tables, grosses of pots, papers, string, scissors, and paste-pots, downstairs. It was not long before Bob Fagin and I, and another boy whose name was Paul Green, but who was currently believed to have been christened Poll (a belief which I transferred, long afterward again, to Mr. Sweedlepipe, in "Martin Chuzzlewit"), worked generally side by side. Bob Fagin was an orphan, and lived with his brother-in-law, a waterman. Poll Green's father had the additional distinction of being a fireman, and was employed at Drury Lane Theatre, where another relation of Poll's, I think his little sister, did imps in the pantomimes.

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sunk into this companionship; compared these every-day associates with those of my happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and hopeless; of the shame I felt in my position; of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any more, cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life.