Great Fortunes, and How They Were MadeMcCabe, James Dabney
History
Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made
McCabe, James Dabney
United States -- Biography
"The man, we repeat, had really a vein of poetry in him, and the first
numbers of 'The Herald' show it. He had occasion one day to mention that
Broadway was about to be paved with wooden blocks. This was not a very
promising subject for a poetical comment, but he added: 'When this is
done, every vehicle will have to wear sleigh-bells, as in sleighing
times, and Broadway will be so quiet that you can pay a compliment to a
lady, in passing, and she will hear you.' This was nothing in itself;
but here was a man wrestling with fate in a cellar, who could turn you
out two hundred such paragraphs a week, the year round. Men can growl in
a cellar; this man could laugh, and keep laughing, and make the floating
population of a city laugh with him. It must be owned, too, that he had
a little real insight into the nature of things around him--a little
Scotch sense, as well as an inexhaustible fund of French vivacity.
Alluding, once, to the 'hard money' cry by which the lying politicians
of the day carried elections, he exploded that nonsense in two lines:
'If a man gets the wearable or the eatable he wants, what cares he if he
has gold or paper money?' He devoted two sentences to the Old School and
New School Presbyterian controversy: 'Great trouble among the
Presbyterians just now. The question is whether or not a man can do any
thing toward saving his own soul.' He had also an article upon the
Methodists, in which he said that the two religions nearest akin were
the Methodist and the Roman Catholic. We should add to these trifling
specimens the fact that he uniformly maintained, from 1835 to the crash
of 1837, that the prosperity of the country was unreal, and would end in
disaster."
These things served the end for which they were intended. They brought
"The Herald" conspicuously before the public. While engaged in them,
the proprietor was anxiously planning the means of making his paper a
great _newspaper_. He worked sixteen or seventeen hours each day. He
rose before five o'clock in the morning, and gave three hours to writing
his editorials and the witty paragraphs to which allusion has been made.
At eight o'clock he went to his cellar, or "office," and was at his post
there during the morning, selling his papers, receiving advertisements,
and often writing them for those who were not able to prepare them,
doing such other work as was necessary, and finishing his editorial
labors. At one o'clock he went into Wall Street, gathering up financial
news and interesting items of the street. He returned to his office at
four o'clock, and remained there until six, when the business of the day
was over. In the evening he went to the theater, a ball, concert, or
some public gathering, to pick up fresh items for his paper.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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