paper which merely inked over a certain amount of white paper each day might be a good collector of news, it might be suc- cessful as a business venture, but that it could leave no mark upon its tune and could have no history."
LABOK CONDITIONS IN BACK OFFICE
From the time of the first strike in the office of Rivington's Gazette during the Revolution, down to as late as 1850, labor jonditions in newspaper offices were far from satisfactory. Most of the trouble between the newspaper and its employees came from the fact that the men who put the items into type were paid for the amount of work they did and not for the amount of time they spent in the composing-room. The men who worked on the morning newspapers especially complained, with con- siderable justification, about the irregularity of their time. Local news and items clipped from the exchanges were usually in type by midnight. There was always the possibility, however, in the case of seaboard cities that some ship bringing important intelligence from abroad might dock at a wharf late in the evening and the newspapers must be prepared to meet just such an emergency. Printers could either hang around the office or they could go home only to be aroused from their slumbers by the office devil, who came with orders to hasten to the office in order that the latest intelligence be put in the morning issue. There was no uniformity in the price which individual papers paid their print- ers, although the morning papers, because of night work, were compelled to pay more on the average to their printers than the evening journals. In order to remedy these conditions, unions were organized, and by the middle of the nineteenth century they did much to improve the conditions of the printers em- ployed on city papers. Editors at the start were not debarred from membership in these unions. Horace Greeley, for ex- ample, was the first president of the New York Printers' Union, which was established in January, 1850. Greeley, in fact, used his trenchant pen in numerous editorials to improve working conditions among New York printers. When The Journal of Commerce and other New York papers criticized the attempt to establish a uniform scale of wages throughout the city, it was
