One thing the group had in common: they were newspaper men; most of them had worked at the case; all of them at one time or another were connected with the press. The new humor was scattered by the newspapers that after the war spread themselves in incredible numbers over America. The exchange system, complained of by Stedman, became nation wide. The good things of one paper were seized upon by the others and sown broadcast. Humorous departments became more and more common, until staid old papers like the _Boston Advertiser_ had yielded to the popular demand. The alarm voiced by Stedman in his letter to Taylor was taken up by the more conservative magazines. The humor of to-day is written for the multitude, complained the ponderous old _North American Review_, "that uncounted host which reads for its romance _The Ledger_ and _The Pirate of the Gulf_. Common schools make us a nation of readers. But common schools, alas! do little to inculcate taste or discrimination in the choice of reading. The mass of the community has a coarse digestion.... It likes horse-laughs."[19] But it is useless to combat the spirit of the age. The wave rolled on until it reached its height in the mid seventies. From journals with an incidental humorous column there had arisen the newspaper that was quoted everywhere and enormously subscribed for solely because of the funny man in charge. The _Danbury News_, the local paper of a small Connecticut city, swelled its subscription list to 40,000 because of its editor Bailey. The vogue of such a paper was not long. At different periods there arose and flourished and declined "Nasby's" _Toledo Blade_, "Lickshingle's" _Oil City Derrick_, Burdette's _Burlington Hawkeye_, "M. Quad's" _Detroit Free Press_, Peck's _Sun_, Sweet's _Texas Siftings_, Read's _Arkansaw Traveller_, and many others. The greater part of this newspaper humor was as fleeting as the flying leaves upon which it was printed. It has disappeared never to be regathered. Even the small proportion of it that was put by its authors into book form has fared little better. From all the host of literary comedians that so shook the period with laughter not over four have taken anything even approaching a permanent place. These four are Browne, Locke, Nast, and Shaw. IV