From a note appended to this passage, we infer that the newspaper which weighed upon the author's mind when he wrote it was the New York Herald. The direct cause, however, of the general license of the press at that time, was not the Herald's bad example, but Andrew Jackson's debauching influence. The same man who found the government pure, and left it corrupt, made the press the organ of his own malignant passions by bestowing high office upon the editors who lied most recklessly about his opponents. In 1843 the press had scarcely begun to recover from this hateful influence, and was still the merest tool of politicians. The Herald, in fact, by demonstrating that a newspaper can flourish in the United States without any aid from politicians, has brought us nearer the time when no newspaper of any importance will be subject to party, which has been the principal cause of the indecencies of the press. The future is bright before the journalists of America. The close of the war, by increasing their income and reducing their expenses, has renewed the youth of several of our leading journals, and given them a better opportunity than they have ever had before. The great error of the publishers of profitable journals hitherto has been the wretched compensation paid to writers and reporters. To this hour there is but one individual connected with the daily press of New York, not a proprietor, who receives a salary sufficient to keep a tolerable house and bring up a family respectably and comfortably; and if any one would find that individual, he must look for him, alas! in the office of the Herald. To be plainer: decent average housekeeping in the city of New York now costs a hundred dollars a week; and there is but one salary of that amount paid in New York to a journalist who owns no property in his journal. The consequence is, that there is scarcely an individual connected with a daily paper who is not compelled or tempted to eke out his ridiculous salary by other writing, to the injury of his health and the constant deterioration of his work. Every morning the public comes fresh and eager to the newspaper: fresh and eager minds should alone minister to it. No work done on this earth consumes vitality so fast as carefully executed composition, and consequently one of the main conditions of a man's writing his best is that he should write little and rest often. A good writer, moreover, is one of Nature's peculiar and very rare products. There is a mystery about the art of composition. Who shall explain to us why Charles Dickens can write about a three-legged stool in such a manner that the whole civilized world reads with pleasure; while another man of a hundred times his knowledge and five times his quantity of mind cannot write on any subject so as to interest anybody? The laws of supply and demand do not apply to this rarity; for one man's writing cannot be compared with another's, there being no medium between valuable and worthless.