its sub-
ject-matter, but also in its mode of treatment. As time went on,
however, it paid less attention to the news and more to literary
articles which it quoted from exchanges. Because of this fact
it fell behind The Sun as a gatherer of news and became more
of a literary publication for the elect of Boston.
A number of German printers who had been connected with The Boston Daily Times started in December, 1844, a morning newspaper of their own called The American Eagle. It was a penny sheet devoted, as its name implies, to the interest of the Native American Party. Successful at first, it was quietly ex- piring a slow death when its promoters decided to start a new evening daily which would be neutral in politics and to let the morning paper die unless it showed more signs of life. The new afternoon venture in Boston journalism was called The Evening Herald and first appeared with an edition of two thousand on August 13, 1846. For four months the editorial and reportorial staff consisted of only two men. Its first page was filled with literary matter and much of the other three consisted of ma- terial " lifted" from the columns of The Morning Eagle. The Herald, feeble as it was, managed to survive financial diseases concomitant with newspaper infancy, and at the beginning of 1847 it appeared with a new dress as The Morning Herald and The Evening Herald. An editorial spoke as follows about the penny press in Boston: "The competition of the penny press has caused a mental activity among all classes; rash and impul- sive it may be, but, nevertheless, far preferable to the dignified stagnation which, in times of yore, was seldom broken by the larger and more expensive journals." A little later The Boston Herald, in an editorial on the "dignity of the penny press," said, among other things :" The time has come when the respectable portion of the community no longer looks to the big sixpenny, lying oracles of politics for just notions on government, exalted piety, or pure and chaste morality. The low price of the penny papers endows their publishers with a philanthropical spirit of disinterestedness, and a regard to the purity of public morals not dependent on pecuniary considerations. A cent is but a nom- inal price for a newspaper, and, therefore, the publishers and editor of a penny print are moved only by an earnest and
