Only a single further step remains to be taken. That step was recently foreshadowed in a leader in which the _Sun_ intimated that the time was not far distant in which it would reject more advertising than it would accept. With a daily circulation of fifty or a hundred thousand more, there is little doubt that the _Sun_ would find it necessary to limit the advertisers as the reporters and other writers for its columns are limited, each to a space to be determined by the public interest in his subject. It will be a long stride in the progress of intellectual as distinguished from commercial journalism, and the _Sun_ will probably be the first to make it, thus distancing the successors of Raymond, Bennett, and Greeley in the great sweepstakes for recognition as the Journal of the Future. [Illustration: JAMES GORDON BENNETT, SR. ] [Illustration: HORACE GREELEY ] [Illustration: HENRY J. RAYMOND ] It must be remembered, in recalling the failure of Dana’s dream of a paper _sans_ advertising, that his mind was not usually the port of vain dreams. He was a practical man, with more business sense than any other editor of his time, Bennett alone excepted. In him imagination had not swallowed arithmetic, and there is no possible doubt that he had good reason to believe in the practicability of the program he so candidly outlined to his readers. It was part and parcel of his faith in a four-page newspaper--a faith so strong, so well grounded on results, that for the first twenty years of the Dana régime the _Sun_ never appeared in more than four pages, except in emergencies. In the end, of course, the scheme was beaten by the very excellence of its originator’s qualities. The _Sun_, by its popularity, drew more and more advertising. By its good English, its freedom from literary shackles, and the spirit of its staff, it attracted more and more writers of distinction, each unwilling to be denied his place in the _Sun_. Dana always had unlimited space for a good story, just as the cat had an insatiable appetite for a bad one; and thus, through his own genius, he destroyed his own dream, but not without having almost proved that it was possible of realisation. Dana believed that most of the newspapers of his day--particularly in the seventies--were tiring out not only the reader, but the writer. Commenting on a decline in the newspaper business in the summer of 1875, the _Sun_ said: Some of our big contemporaries have been overdoing the thing. They seem to think that to secure circulation it is necessary to overload the stomachs of their readers. The American newspaper-reader demands of an editor that he shall not give him news and discussions in heavy chunks, but so condensed and clarified that he shall be relieved of the necessity of wading through a treatise to get at a fact, or spending time on a dilated essay to get a bite at an argument.