10 
Dr. Talmage on Starting News¬ 
papers. 
Rev. Mr. Talmage, of the Brooklyn Tab¬ 
ernacle, preached last Sunday on News¬ 
papers, and in course of the sermon he 
said; 
I think I could arouse your appreciation 
of this great blessing if I told you the mon¬ 
ey, the brain, the exasperation, the anxie¬ 
ties, the losses, the wear and tear of heart 
strings involved in the publication c*f a 
newspaper. On the theory abroad in the 
world that anybodv can make one, inex¬ 
perienced capitalists every year are enter¬ 
ing the lists, and it is a simple statistic that 
there is an average of a dead newspaper 
every day of the year. Generally three or 
four fortunes are swallowed up before a 
newspaper is established. The large pa¬ 
pers swallow up the small papers—one 
whale taking down 50 minnows. Although 
we have over 7000 dailies and weeklies in 
the United States and the Canadas, only 
thirty-six of them are a half century old. 
The average of newspaper life is five years. 
Most of them die of cholera infantum. 
[Laughter.] It is high time it were under¬ 
stood that the most successful way of sink¬ 
ing a fortune and keeping it sunk is to start 
a newspaper. Almost every intelligent man 
during his life is smitten with the newspa¬ 
per mania; start a newspaper or have stock 
in one he must or die. This is often the 
process: A literary man has an idea, 
moral, social, political, or religious, which 
he wishes to ventilate. He has no money 
of his own—literary men seldom have— 
but he talks his idea among confidential 
friends, and forthwith they are inflamed 
with the idea, and they buy type and press 
and rent a composing room, and engage a 
corps of editors, and then a prospectus, 
which threatens to conquor everything, 
goes forth, and then the first issue is thrown 
upon the attention of an admiring world. 
After a few weeks or months, a plain stock¬ 
holder finds that there is no especial revo¬ 
lution, and that neither the sun nor the 
moon has stood still, and that the world 
still goes on lying and cheating and steal¬ 
ing just as it did before the first issue of 
the New York Thunderer or the Universal 
Gazette or the Hallelujah Advocate. Forth¬ 
with the plain stockholder wants to 
sell his stock, but nobody wants to 
buy it, and others disgusted with the in¬ 
vestment want to sell their stock, and an 
enormous bill of the paper factory rolls in 
like an avalanche, and the printers refuse 
to work until they have their back pay, and 
the subscribers wonder why their paper 
does not come. Let me tell you, oh, man, 
that if you have an idea on any moral, social, 
political or religious subject you had better 
charge on the world through the columns 
already established. Do not take the idea 
so prevalent that when a man can do noth¬ 
ing else he can edit a newspaper. If you 
cannot climb the hill back of your house 
you had better not try the sides of the 
Matterhorn; if you cannot navigate a sloop 
up the North river you had better not try 
to engineer the Great Eastern over to Liver¬ 
pool. To publish a newspaper requires the 
skill, the precision, the vigilance, the 
strategy, the boldness of a commander-in¬ 
chief; to edit a newspaper one needs to be 
a statesman, an essayist, a geographer a 
statistician, and, so far as all acquisition is 
concerned, encyclopedic. To man and to 
propel a newspaper requires more qualities 
than any other business on earth. I say this 
to save men from bankruptcy. If you feel 
called to start or publish a newspaper, 
take it for granted you are threatened 
with softening of the brain; throw your 
pocketbook into your wife’s lap and rush up 
to Bloomingdale Asylum and surrender 
yourself before you do something desper¬ 
ate. Meanwhile let the dead newspapers 
be carried out to their burial week bv 
week, and let the newspapers that live give 
your obituary. 
- t-* - 
Dr. John A. Warder. 
As I read in a Philadelphia paper last ev¬ 
ening, an announcement of the death of Dr. 
Warder of Ohio, my mind reverted to many 
pleasant memories of that good man. My 
acquaintance with him was by no means 
intimate, but it was of a character to reveal 
his extreme kindness and thoughtfulness, 
which, in a man whose life was crowded 
