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since repaid, but the sense of obligation to the far from wealthy friend who made the loan is none the less fresh and ardent,) he undertook the enterprise—at all times and under any circumstances hazardous—of adding one more to the already amply extensive list of daily newspapers issued in this emporium, where the current expenses of such papers, already appalling, were soon to be doubled by rivalry, by stimulated competition, by the progress of business, the complication of interests, and especially by the general diffusion of the electric telegraph, and where at least nineteen out of every twenty attempts to establish a new daily have proved disastrous failures.
Manifestly, the prospects of success in this case were far from flattering.
The Tribune began with about six hundred subscribers, procured by the exertions of a few of the editor's personal and political friends.
Five thousand copies of the first number were printed, and ‘we found some difficulty in giving them away,’ says
Mr. Greeley in the article just quoted.
The expenses of the first week were five hundred and twenty-five dollars; the receipts, ninety-two dollars. A sorry prospect for an editor whose whole cash capital was a thousand dollars, and that borrowed.
But the Tribune was a live paper.
Fight was the word with it from the start; fight has been the word ever since; fight is the word this day!
If it had been let alone, it would not have died; its superiority both in quantity and the quality of its matter to any other of the cheap papers would have prevented that catastrophe; but its progress was amazingly accelerated in the first days of its existence by the efforts of an enemy to put it down.
That enemy was the
Sun.
‘The publisher of the
Sun,’ wrote
Park Benjamin in the
Evening Signal,
has, during the last few days, got up a conspiracy to crush the New York Tribune.
The Tribune was, from its inception, very successful, and, in many instances, persons in the habit of taking the Sun, stopped that paper-wisely preferring a sheet which gives twice the amount of reading matter, and always contains the latest intelligence.
This fact afforded sufficient evidence to Beach, as it did to all others who were cognizant of the circumstances, that the Tribune would, before the lapse of many weeks, supplant the Sun. To prevent this, and, if possible, to destroy the
