Arrears long cost New York editors the same sleepless nights which they cost the owners of some ill-managed country journals to-day. City residents paid regularly, for they could be reached through the ten-pound court if they did not; but in 1805 Coleman despairingly affirmed that “not one in a hundred” of the subscribers to the semi-weekly were prompt. In some centers, as Boston, from $500 to $1,000 was due the _Post_ and _Herald_, and in Kingston, Canada, more than $60 was owed merely for postage. “The loss that arises from neglected arrearages would amount to not less than 30 per cent.,” lamented the editor. It was necessary to send a collector up through New York and New England to Upper Canada, stopping for money all along the mail routes. When Michael Burnham took charge, on Nov. 16, 1806, business affairs were greatly systematized; a fact of which we find evidence both in the disappearance of complaints of arrears, and in the ledgers and a curious old account book, 1801–1810. These accounts throw much light on mechanical details. A frequent charge for “skins” presumably refers to the buckskins which were cut and rolled into balls, soaked in ink, and then used by the printers’ devils to pound the forms and thus ink the type. Almost daily charges appear for candles and quill pens. The journal seems to have paid many of the expenses of apprentices, for there are numerous entries for “cloathing” and for board at $3 a week. Coleman drew upon the till occasionally, as is shown by an item of May 25, 1809: “Boots for Mr. Coleman, $10.” But all the improvements that Burnham made in the business management did not save Coleman at times before 1810 from half-resolving to let the _Evening Post_ die and to return to the bar again; in the year named, when he was trying to arrange his English debts, he confessed such a hesitation. When Duane of the _Aurora_ charged that the Federalist newspapers in seaport towns were bribed “by support in the form of _mercantile advertisements_” to oppose all Jefferson’s measures, Coleman bitterly replied that Federalist merchants actually neglected their press. Taking up a copy of the chief Federalist organ in Philadelphia, and one of the chief neutral journal there, he found six ship advertisements in the former and forty in the latter; while “on a particular day not long since the New York _Gazette_ had eighty-five new advertisements, the _Mercantile Advertiser_ sixty-one, and the _Evening Post_ nine.”