The _Sun_ was as frank in discussing its own theories and ambitions as it was in criticising its contemporaries for dulness and poor writing. Dana’s dream, never to be realized, was a newspaper without advertisements. He believed that by getting all the news, condensing it into the smallest readable space, and adding such literary matter as the readers’ tastes demanded, a four-page paper might be produced with a reasonable profit from the sales, after paper and ink, men and machinery, had been paid for. An editorial article in the _Sun_ on March 13, 1875, was practically a prospectus of this idea: Until Robert Bonner sagaciously foresaw a handsome profit to be realized by excluding advertisements and crowding a small sheet with such choice literature as would surely attract a mighty throng of readers, never did the owner of any serial publication so much as dream of making both ends meet without a revenue from advertisements. The _Tribune_, the _Times_, and the _Herald_ at length ceased to expect a profit from their circulation, and then they came to care for large editions only so far as they served to attract advertisers. It was then that the _Sun_ conceived the idea of a daily newspaper that should yield more satisfactory dividends from large circulation than had ever been declared by the journals that had looked to the organism of political parties and to enterprising advertisers for the bulk of their income. It saw in New York a city of sufficient population to warrant the experiment of a two-cent newspaper whose cost should equal that of the four-cent dailies in every respect, the cost of white paper alone excepted. Accordingly we produced the _Sun_ on a sheet that leaves a small margin for profit, and by restricting the space allotted to advertisers and eliminating the verbiage in which the eight-page dailies hide the news, we made room in the _Sun_ for not only all the real news of the day, but for interesting literature and current political discussion as well. It was an enterprise that the public encouraged with avidity. The edition rapidly rose to one hundred and twenty thousand copies daily, and it is now rising; while the small margin of profit on that enormous circulation makes the _Sun_ able to exist without paying any special attention to advertising--approaching very closely, in fact, to the condition of a daily newspaper able to support itself on the profits of its circulation alone.