The Morning Post

“ The Hour is a new journal, started in opposition to the Standard, and professing the same politics. It is hardly within our ken so far, and the same may be said of the Morning Post, which has its own exclusive clientèle. In referring to the foregoing journals, we have made no remarks beyond those to which we are guided by their own published statements, and we have intended nothing invidious in the order of selection. For obvious reasons we shall say nothing of the evening papers, beyond that all seem to fill their advertisement columns with ease, and to be excellent mediums of publicity. ”

“ Advertisers not to be late in their communications, if intended for the next day’s publication; as the extraordinary Sale of THE TIMES, which is decidedly superior to that of every other Morning Paper, compels us to go to press at a very early hour.”
The Morning Post, November 17th (which number is unfortunately missing in the British Museum file) , challenged the statement—to which the Times replied on the 18th: “This declaration of our Sale, a Morning Paper of yesterday has thought proper to contradict, and boldly claims the superiority. ”

“ As he wends his way homeward, he meets a citizen who has for once for some reason arisen at what seems to him an unholy hour of the morning.
“Good morning,” says the citizen, “what in the world are you doing up so early?”
“Oh,” says the night editor, “we newspaper men have to rise real early in order to get the paper out by breakfast time.”
“To be sure, to be sure,” says the citizen. “I never thought of that!”
(Houston Daily Post, Sunday morning, March 29, 1896.) ”

“ In excellent time, for once. She carried a copy of the Morning Post.
“I have been trying to find out from this,” said she, lightly tapping the newspaper with her eyeglasses, “whether Congress is sitting at present. ”

“ But now, what has been their conduct? The Morning Post, the British Press, the Morning Herald, and the Morning Advertizer, have given a part, and a part only, of what they found in the Observer.
The Morning Herald and the British Press gave nearly the words of the p. 17Observe but inserted the article in as obscure a manner as possible. The Morning Post curtails the article of the Observer to about a fifth part, and puts it at the bottom of a column, in a part of the paper likely to escape observation. The Morning Advertiser curtails the article still further ”

“ It is he who lights up the brilliancy of the morning star, the changing splendor of the moon, and the glorious companies of the starry host, and has arrayed the expanse of heaven, like some vast mantle, in colors of varied beauty. ”

“ In accordance with this conception of my functions, I always held the news idea in mind. I was alert to secure advance sheets of important books, in order that the Evening Post might be the first of newspapers to tell readers about them.
Usually the publishers were ready and eager to give the Evening Post these opportunities, though the literary editors of some morning newspapers bitterly complained of what they regarded as favoritism when I was able to anticipate them. On one very notable occasion, however, great pains were taken by the publishers to avoid all [218] grounds of complaint. ”

“ The most trying thing to people of very set habits is an unusual breakfast hour. When you have the unfortunate habit of waking with the dawn, and the household you are visiting has the custom of sleeping on Sunday morning, the long wait for your coffee can quite actually upset your whole day. On the other hand, to be aroused at seven on the only day when you do not have to hurry to business, in order to yawn through an early breakfast, and then sit around and kill time, is quite as trying. ”

“ To some, nine o'clock in the morning may sound rather eccentric for a wedding, but to people of the Atlantic Coast it is not a bit more so than an evening hour—less so, if anything, because morning is unconventional anyway and etiquette, never being very strong at that hour, is not defied, but merely left quiescent. ”

“ Translations or abstracts of the leading articles of The Times, Morning Chronicle, Morning Post, &c., are constantly to be met with in the best foreign papers. Why should not our great London papers more frequently gratify their readers with articles from the pens of their Continental brotherhood? ”

“ One of the greatest achievements of our own time, yet too often overlooked, is the marvellously rapid diffusion of parliamentary news throughout the country. Important debates are frequently protracted in the House of Commons into the early hours of the morning. ”

“ We usually take the reckoning of our money early in the morning, but of our actions, of all that we have said and done by day, let us demand of ourselves the account after supper, and even after nightfall, as we lie upon our bed, with none to trouble, none to disturb us. ”

“ Admirable! This could not have been better said in its own place, on account of the words, “From the morning watch.” Wherefore? Because the Lord rose again from the morning watch; and the body ought to hope for that which went before in the Head. ”

“ The jam of pack animals in the narrow street straightened out under the stimulus of the arrieros’ rawhide thongs and we clattered by the little plaza and on up a narrow, rain-washed gully flanked with the thatched mud huts of the Aymarás, on past the walled cemetery and into 141 the steep trail that led up the mountains. High above us the peaks were still hidden in soft masses of clouds that were already golden under the first rays of the morning sun. ”

“ THE FIGHTING WHALE AND CHINAMEN IN THE CHICKEN COOP
The hot days drifted by in easy sociability, dividing themselves into a pliant routine. The morning was devoted to golf on the canvas covered deck over a nine-hole course chalked around ventilators, chicken-coops and deck-houses. Crook-handled canes furnished the clubs and three sets of checkers were lost overboard before we reached the Guayas River, the little round men skidding flatly over the deck with a pleasing accuracy only at the end to rise up maliciously on one ear and roll, plop, into the sea. ”

“ One of the most important of the world’s industries carried on at night is the making of the great morning daily newspaper. The average reader who unfolds his paper above his coffee cup in the morning rarely reflects that it represents the labor of half a hundred men, a great number of whom bend their lagging steps homeward only when the newsboy has begun to wake the morning echoes with his familiar cry. ”

“ Nothing is more gratifying on arising in the morning and sitting down to partake of a daintily served breakfast than to glance hurriedly over the front page of one's favorite newspaper and see it covered with startling headlines. It matters little what has happened during the night to shock the community, so long as it satisfies one's appetite for sensational news. ”

“ A newspaper is an instrument of great importance; all men read it; many read nothing else; some it serves as reason and conscience too: in lack of better, why not? It speaks to thousands every day on matters of great moment—on matters of morals, of politics, of finance. It relates daily the occurrences of our land, and of all the world. All men are affected by it; hindered or helped. To many a man his morning paper represents more reality than his morning prayer. ”

“ But I am chiefly conscious to-night of the debt of gratitude we all owe to the press. The newspaper—say what you will of it—is the immediate recorder and interpreter of life. Morning and evening it offers us that perpetual stimulus which makes the zest of living. Be your interests what they may, though you abstract your mind from the tumult of affairs and devote it to art or science, you cannot open a news [Pg 683] paper without the sensation of laying your hand upon the throbbing pulse of the world. ”

“ Thousands seldom listen to a clergyman. But in these wide-awake days everybody of any account must read the newspaper, for the reading of the newspaper has come to be absolutely essential to the daily routine of every intelligent person. The things we read in the morning newspaper are the things we talk about during the day. If you are interested in politics, or if you are interested in finance, or the fluctuations of prices, or the movements of society, or any phase of trade or commerce, or in any of the vital questions of the hour—for all of these you turn to the newspaper. ”

“ We commenced our issue last year avowedly as an evening journal; we claim now the distinction of having changed the fashion of evening newspapers. When this journal appeared, the morning journals had, it may be said, the day to themselves. No evening paper had more than an insignificant circulation. In these days it has long been little less than absurd that the people of this great country should have no new medium of information as to the news of the world from the midnight hour when what are called morning papers are made up. ”

“ The celerity with which news is gathered, written, transmitted, edited, published, and served on millions of breakfast-tables every morning in the year is one of the wonders of the age. When great events happen, especially of a dramatic nature, we see newspapers at their best. ”

“ Breakfast—a leisurely, jolly affair as I would have it, with every member of the household present on the stroke of the gong—is unequalled as a unifying force. The plea that everybody is in a hurry in the morning is no excuse; if there is any hour when haste is unprofitable it is that first morning hour. ”

“ Morning is not romantic. Romance is the twilight spell; but morn is bright and joyous, prompt with action, and full of sanguine hope. Life has few difficulties in the morning, at least, none which we cannot conquer; and a private secretary to a minister, young and prosperous, at his first meal, surrounded by dry toast, all the newspapers, and piles of correspondence, asking and promising everything, feels with pride and delight the sense of powerful and responsible existence. ”

“ Newspapers have become almost as necessary to our daily life as bread itself. The mind demands its breakfast as well as the body; and to many a busy man the loss of his morning paper would be as great a deprivation as the want of his usual matutinal meal. ”

“ Morning after morning, from the back-page of your newspaper, quick and uncostly cures for every human ill thrust themselves wildly on you. The age of miracles is not past. But I would raise no false hopes of myself. ”

“ They encourage bad manners and selfishness. A newspaper is an impudent intrusion at the table at any time, but on Sunday its presence is a crime. On an occasion, the late William Graham Sumner was a guest in my house. Like the alert, clear-thinking philosopher he was, he rose early and read the morning paper before breakfast. ”

“ It came, that last morning, a fine morning flushed with the new life of the world that trembles hesitatingly in the spring of the year, and steeps the hearts of men and women with stronger hope and wider ambition; such a morning as draws a veil over past failures and disappointments, and floods the future with success and achievement. It seemed a pity to have to die on such a morning, and for one moment there was regret in the highwayman's soul as he took his place in the cart. ”

“ The newspaper man toils while others play—and his night’s work ends somewhat dismally by his dragging home at two o’clock in the morning, maybe through storm or sleet or tempest, to a cold, cheerless, silent, dark home—a home unattractive under these conditions despite every effort to make it otherwise. ”

“ The editorship of the Evening Post made him not merely a news vender but a molder of public thought, and his entrance into the world of opinion gave him more of an interest in life itself and less in his own emotions. ”

“ So, drawing in deep breaths of the morning air, you believe in your freedom and in your worth, though you ought to be aware, and at heart are aware, that the world is holding its snares ready to entangle you in them, and that in all probability you will again be lying in bed until nine to-morrow morning, because you had got into it at two the night before, heated, befogged, and full of passionate debate. ”

“ And such is the high personal honor of the average Parisian news gatherer that one Paris morning paper, which specializes in actual news as counter-distinguished from the other Paris papers which rely upon political screeds to fill their columns, locks its doors and disconnects its telephones at 8 o'clock in the evening, so that reporters coming in after that hour must stay in till press time lest some of them—such is the fear—will peddle all the exclusive stories off to less enterprising contemporaries. ”

“ We do not, as the Wall street lazy editors do, come down to our office about ten or twelve o'clock, pull out a Spanish cigar, take up a pair of scissors, puff and cut, cut and puff for a couple of hours, and then adjourn to Del- monico's to eat, drink, gormandize, and blow up our contemporaries. We rise in the morning at five o'clock, write our leading editorials, squibs, sketches, etc., before breakfast. From nine till one we read all our papers and original communications, the latter being more numerous than those of any other office in New York. ”

“ The morning is the time to write. We are all—that is, those of us who sleep well—optimists in the morning. And the world is sad enough without our writing books to make it sadder. The rest of this book, I promise you, shall be written of a morning. ”

“ If it happen to be seven o’clock, and a Friday morning, not only the doors of the great newsvenders—such as Messrs. Smith and Son and Mr. Vickers—but the portals of all the newspaper offices, will be crowded with newsmen’s carts and newsmen’s trucks; and from the gaping gates themselves will issue hordes of newsmen and flying cohorts of newsboys—boys with parcels, boys with bags, boys with satchels, men staggering under the weight of great piles of printed paper. Mercy on us! what a plethora of brainwork is about, and what a poor criterion of its quality the quantity manifestly affords! ”