The _Journal of Commerce_ was a great sixpenny, but it was not for the people to read. From 1828 until the Civil War its editor was Gerard Hallock, an enterprising journalist who ran expensive horse-expresses to Washington to get the proceedings of Congress, but would not admit that the public at large was more interested in a description of the murdered Helen Jewett’s gowns than in a new currency bill. The clipper-ships that lay off Sandy Hook to get the latest foreign news from the European vessels cost Hallock and Webb, who combined in this enterprise, twenty thousand dollars a year--probably more than they spent on all their local news. In the solemn sanctum of the _Evening Post_, William Cullen Bryant and William Leggett wrote scholarly verse and free-trade editorials. They were live men, but their newspaper steed was slow. Leggett could urge Bryant to give a beating to Stone, the editor of the _Commercial Advertiser_, and he himself fought a duel with Blake, the treasurer of the Park Theatre; but these great men had little steam when it came to making a popular newspaper. The great editors were of a cult. They revolved around one another, too far aloft for the common eye. Charles King was the most conservative of them all. He was a son of Rufus King, Senator from New York and minister to England, and he was editor of the _American_, an evening sixpenny, from 1827 to 1845. He lacked nothing in scholarship, but his paper was miserably dull, and rarely circulated more than a thousand copies. He remained at his editorial desk for four years after the _American_ was absorbed by the _Courier and Enquirer_, and then he became president of Columbia College, a place better suited to him. Such were the men who ruled the staid, prosy, and expensive newspapers of New York when Day and his penny _Sun_ popped up. Most of them are better known to fame than Day is, but not one of them did anything comparable to the young printer’s achievement in making a popular, low-priced daily newspaper--and not only making it, but making it stick. For Day started something that went rolling on, increasing in size and weight until it controlled the thought of the continent. Day was the Columbus, the _Sun_ was the egg. Anybody could do the trick--after Day showed how simple it was. Bennett and his _Herald_ were the first to profit by the example of the young Yankee printer. It should have been easy for Bennett, yet he had already failed at the same undertaking. He was at work in the newspaper field of New York as early as 1824, nine years before Day started the _Sun_. He failed as proprietor of the Sunday _Courier_ (1825), and he failed again with the Philadelphia _Pennsylvanian_. He had a wealth of experience as assistant to Webb and as the Washington correspondent of the _Enquirer_.