Why, then, did not this powerful combination supplant the Herald? If
mere ability in the writing of a newspaper; if to have given an
impulse to thought and enterprise; if to have won the admiration and
gratitude of a host of the best men and women in America; if to have
inspired many thousands of young men with better feelings and higher
purposes than they would else have attained; if to have shaken the
dominion of superstition, and made it easier for men to think freely,
and freely utter their thought; if to have produced a newspaper more
interesting than any other in the world to certain classes in the
community;--if all these things had sufficed to give a daily paper the
first position in the journalism of a country, then the Tribune would
long ago have attained that position; for all these things, and many
more, the Tribune did. But they do not suffice. Such things may be
incidental to a great success: they cannot cause it. Great
journalism--journalism pure and simple--alone can give a journal the
first place. If Mr. Raymond had been ten years older, and had founded
and conducted the paper, with Mr. Greeley as his chief writer of
editorials,--that is, if the _journalist_ had been the master of the
journal, instead of the writer, the politician, and the
philanthropist,--the Tribune might have won the splendid prize. Mr.
Greeley is not a great journalist. He has regarded journalism rather
as a disagreeable necessity of his vocation, and uniformly abandoned
the care of it to others. An able man generally gets what he ardently
seeks. Mr. Greeley produced just such a paper as he himself would have
liked to take, but not such a paper as the public of the island of
Manhattan prefers. He regards this as his glory. We cannot agree with
him, because his course of management left the field to the Herald,
the suppression of which was required by the interests of
civilization.
The Tribune has done great and glorious things for us. Not free, of
course, from the errors which mark all things human, it has been, and
is, a civilizing power in this land. We hope to have the pleasure of
reading it every day for the rest of our lives. One thing it has
failed to do,--to reduce the Herald to insignificance by surpassing it
in the particulars in which it is excellent. We have no right to
complain. We only regret that the paper representing the civilization
of the country should not yet have attained the position which would
have given it the greatest power.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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