ALFRED ELY BEACH A Son of Moses Y. Beach; He Left “The Sun” to Conduct the “Scientific American.” ] Beach Brothers, as the new ownership of the _Sun_ was entitled, made but one important change in the appearance and character of the paper during the next few years. Up to the coming of the telegraph the _Sun_ had devoted its first page to advertising, with a spice of reading-matter that usually was in the form of reprint--miscellany, as some newspapermen call it, or bogus, as most printers term it. But when telegraphic news came to be common but costly, newspapers began to see the importance of attracting the casual reader by means of display on the front page. The Beaches presently used one or two columns of the latest telegraph-matter on the first page; sometimes the whole page would be so occupied. In 1850, from July to December, they issued an _Evening Sun_, which carried no advertising. On April 6, 1852, Alfred Ely Beach, more concerned with scientific matters than with the routine of daily publication, withdrew from the _Sun_, which passed into the sole possession of Moses S. Beach, then only thirty years old. It was reported that when the partnership was dissolved the division was based on a total valuation of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the paper which, less than nineteen years before, Ben Day had started with an old hand-press and a hatful of type. Horace Greeley, telling a committee of the British parliament about American newspapers, named that sum as the amount for which the _Sun_ was valued in the sale by brother to brother. “It was very cheap,” he added. CHAPTER VIII “THE SUN” DURING THE CIVIL WAR _One of the Few Entirely Loyal Newspapers of New York.--Its Brief Ownership by a Religious Coterie.--It Returns to the Possession of M. S. Beach, Who Sells It to Dana._ In 1852, when Moses Sperry Beach came into the sole ownership of the _Sun_, it was supposed that the slavery question had been settled forever, or at least with as much finality as was possible in determining such a problem. The Missouri Compromise, devised by Henry Clay, had acted as a legislative mandragora which lulled the United States and soothed the spasms of the extreme Abolitionists. Even Abraham Lincoln, now passing forty years, was losing that interest in politics which he had once exhibited, and was devoting himself almost entirely to his law practice in Springfield, Illinois. The _Sun_ had plenty of news to fill its four wide pages, and its daily circulation was above fifty thousand. The Erie Railroad had stretched itself from Piermont, on the Hudson River, to Dunkirk, on the shore of Lake Erie. The Hudson River Railroad was built from New York to Albany. The steamship Pacific, of the Collins Line, had broken the record by crossing the Atlantic in nine days and nineteen hours. The glorious yacht America had beaten the British Titania by eight miles in a race of eighty miles.