In those days expresses were run on election nights, and in times of great excitement the _Herald_ and _Tribune_ raced locomotive engines against each other in order to get the earliest news; on one occasion, we remember, the sharp reporter engaged for the _Tribune_ “appropriating” an engine which was waiting, under steam, for the use of the opposition agent, and so beating the _Herald_ at its own game.... Nor was the competition confined to enterprises like these. For want of the boundless facilities now afforded by the organized enterprises of the newspaper offices, there were curious experiments in unexpected directions; type was set on board of North River steamboats by corps of printers, who had a speech ready for the press in New York soon after its delivery in Albany; carrier pigeons, carefully trained, flew from Halifax or Boston with the latest news from Europe tucked under their wings, and delivered their charge to their trainer in his room near Wall Street; an adventurous person, known at the time by the mysterious title of “the man in the glazed cap,” made a voyage across the Atlantic in a common pilot boat twenty years ago, secretly and with only three or four companions, in the interest of two or three journals which determined to “beat” the others in their arrangements for obtaining early news from abroad. Charles H. Levermore twenty years ago expressed regret in the _American Historical Review_ that the revolution in journalism had been wrought by the unprincipled Bennett, and not by a man of such education, taste, and high-mindedness as Bryant, whose name would assure the standards of his newspaper. The best journalist and worst editor in the country, Parton called Bennett, deploring the fact that during the Civil War neither the _Times_, _Tribune_ nor _World_ could reduce the “bad, good _Herald_,” which Lincoln read, to a second rank. Parke Godwin, writing upon Bennett’s death in 1872 in the _Evening Post_, refused him the title of a great journalist even, stating that he was a great news-vender. “What he said from day to day was said merely to produce a sensation, to raise a laugh, or to confirm a vulgar prejudice; and so far as he had any influence at all as a writer, it was one that debased and corrupted the community in which his paper was read. He did more to vulgarize the tone of the press in this country than any man ever before connected with it; and the worst caricatures that the genius of Balzac, Dickens, and Thackeray has given us of the low, slang-whanging, dissolute, and unprincipled Bohemian, of the Lousteaus, Jefferson Bricks, and Capt. Shandons of the journalistic profession, fail to depict what Bennett actually was.” But his journal was read as no other had been. Men concealed it when they saw a friend approaching it, but they bought it and examined every column.