eyes open, you will see something that they seem blind to, and must speak out accordingly. Do your best to keep the number of public trusts, the amount of official emoluments, and the consequent rate of taxation other than for common schools as low as may be. Remember that—in addition to the radical righteousness of the thing—the tax-payers take many more papers than the tax-consumers.
I would like to say more, but am busied excessively. That you may deserve and achieve success is the earnest prayer of
Yours truly,Horace Greeley.
In view of Greeley's prominence in the journalism world, this letter was taken as a guidebook by the country publisher, who ever since has tried to follow all the advice given save that mentioned in the last paragraph. For some reason, the country weekly could not break away from partisan bias—something that Greeley himself was unable to do. The party "pap" which politicians handed out to local papers undoubtedly had something to do with this allegiance of party and country press. The printing of the session laws of the State, the insertion of announcements about sales by the sheriff, the publishing of the calendar of the county court, etc., were too profitable to the country publisher to make him independent of party allegiance. In addition, the printing of the campaign literature always went to a party publisher in spite of the fact that the independent printer would do the job cheaper. Only in recent years has the country publisher learned that "the taxpayers take more papers than the tax consumers," and the lesson has not been very well learned yet, as any newspaper directory will show.
Country weeklies of which there are now more than twenty thousand, have on the whole been closer to readers than the daily papers. The suggestion given by Greeley and followed by rural editors partly explains the fact, for the weekly became the printed diary of the home town. No finer tribute has been paid to rural journalism than that which came from the pen of William Allen White, editor of The Gazette, of Emporia, Kansas:—
Our papers, our little country papers, seem drab and miserably provincial to strangers; yet we who read them read in their lines the sweet, intimate story of life. And all these touches of nature make us won-
