errors from which, in days of yore, he was as free as most men.
I am sometimes constrained, upon better acquaintance, to
think and speak well of men whom I once reprobated. I have
never yet felt disposed to vituperate a man that I once esteemed
and commended. If such sink into vicious courses, I leave their
exposure to others. I should as soon think of assassination as
attacking a friend because he differed from me in politics." In-
cidentally, it may be remarked that The Public Advertiser just
mentioned had started as a weekly in 1818, but became on
April 4, 1826, the first daily paper in Kentucky. It was then
edited by Shadrach Penn, Jr.
The coarseness, the shallowness, the distortion of news, the use of the press to avenge private wrongs, all this and much more could be excused, but no reason can be found to justify the papers which so often during this period were little short of be- ing blackmailers and blackguards. But such newspapers, as dur- ing the periods which followed, were but a mirror of the times, and their editors were no better, or no worse, than the other men of the day. Even the books of the period were at times so full of scandal and untruth that they had to be suppressed or their publishers, being afraid that they would be prosecuted for libel, either removed the title-pages or cut their names from the imprint. It is important to bear in mind that no better cri- terion exists by which to judge any particular period than the newspapers published during the same era. Before hasty judg- ment is passed upon newspapers, a study should be made of the times in which they were published.
PRESS A MIRROR OF TIMES
Personal fights between editors cannot be understood to-day without a knowledge of the condition of the times. It was a period of personal encounters in the home and of fights in the streets. New York newspapers told of the fights between the Battery boys and the Lispenard Hill's : Boston papers recorded in detail the encounters between the North-Enders and the Charlestown Pigs; Philadelphia papers published the fights be- tween the Chestnut Street boys and the crowd which called themselves the Northern Liberties. Roughly speaking, there
