Adventure stories; City and town life -- Fiction; Staffordshire (England) -- Fiction
Then came the announcement of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the
_Signal_, and of the processional fête by which the _Signal_ was at once
to give itself a splendid spectacular advertisement and to reward and
enhearten its boys. The _Signal_ meant to liven up the streets of the
Five Towns on that great day by means of a display of all the gilt
chariots of Snape’s Circus in the main thoroughfares. Many of the boys
would be in the gilt chariots. Copies of the anniversary number of the
_Signal_ would be sold from the gilt chariots. The idea was excellent,
and it showed that after all the _Signal_ was getting just a little more
afraid of its young rival than it had pretended to be.
For, strange to say, after a trying period of hesitation, the _Five
Towns Daily_ was slightly on the upward curve—thanks to Denry. Denry
did not mean to be beaten by the puzzle which the _Daily_ offered to his
intelligence. There the _Daily_ was, full of news, and with quite an
encouraging show of advertisements, printed on real paper with real
ink—and yet it would not "go." Notoriously the _Signal_ earned a net
profit of at the very least five thousand a year, whereas the _Daily_
earned a net loss of at the very least sixty pounds a week—and of that
sixty quite a third was Denry’s money. He could not explain it. Mr.
Myson tried to rouse the public by passionately stirring up extremely
urgent matters—such as the smoke-nuisance, the increase of the rates,
the park question, German competition, technical education for
apprentices; but the public obstinately would not be roused concerning
its highest welfare to the point of insisting on a regular supply of the
_Daily_. If a mere five thousand souls had positively demanded daily a
copy of the _Daily_ and not slept till boys or agents had responded to
their wish, the troubles of the _Daily_ would soon have vanished. But
this ridiculous public did not seem to care which paper was put into its
hand in exchange for its halfpenny so long as the sporting news was put
there. It simply was indifferent. It failed to see the importance to
such an immense district of having two flourishing and mutually opposing
daily organs. The fundamental boy difficulty remained ever-present.
And it was the boy difficulty that Denry perseveringly and ingeniously
attacked, until at length the _Daily_ did indeed possess some sort of a
brigade of its own, and the bullying and slaughter in the streets (so
amusing to the inhabitants) grew a little less one-sided.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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