spared no effort to get all the sensational news of the day. His policy was justified by the immense circulation which the Times enjoyed, a circulation greater than any of its competitors, notwithstanding the fact that political prejudice ran high during the war. Had it not been for the outrageous blood sucking which began soon after the dissclution of the partnership between Mr. Story and Mr. Chandler, the Chicago Times would be today the rival of the New York Herald as a daily paper. It could have been sold in 1880 for $1,000,000, which then represented a very great price for a newspaper. The business management of a newspaper is its source of life. This has been demonstrated in the preservation of the valuable property which the Chicago Tribune represents at the present time.

In the sixties the business men of Chicago were rarely called upon for advertising. Few, if any, papers had what could be called special advertising representatives; but in 1870 there was a decided movement along the line of working up newspaper advertising, and at the time of the big fire special agents were quite numerous in the field.

Large revenues were derived by the newspapers from advertisements of lotteries, of which the Crosby Opera House lottery was one of the largest in 1868. Very soon after that the different states passed laws prohibiting lotteries, and that class of advertising dropped off.

No one thing did more to work up general advertising than the Sunday papers, in which were to be found an immense number of advertisements of real estate, which was then booming. These swelled the profits of the Sunday editions and that class of advertising gradually extended to the daily issues. After the fire of 1871 there was a large increase in all kinds of publications, dailies, weeklies and monthlies. The immense growth of trade journalism has all taken place since that time.

The growth of the agricultural newspaper in Chicago during the past twentyfive years has been very marked. Where in 1870 there were but two, in 1880 ten, there are at the prsent time thirty-two publications devoted to farming or subjects pertaining to the different branches of agriculture. The general farmer is more than ever dependent upon his agricultural paper for guidance in the management of his farm, because old-fashioned methods cannot now be followed with profit. He no longer relies upon

his neighbor's example and experience, but is guided by the scientific instruction and experience of the state agricultural experiment stations. Many city professional men are making a success of farming by following business methods aided by the counsel of the experiment stations.

The growth of advertising along agricultural lines and in agricultural mediums has been very great. Fifteen years ago the advertising agencies had no special agricultural departments, nor did we have any advertising agencies devoted exclusively to this branch of advertising. The rapid and rich development of the United States as an agricultural producer and its enormous exports of agricultural products have been the great cause of our unusual business prosperity where other countries have experienced dull trade conditions.

The general agricultural paper is therefore filling a greater need than ever before for the reason that the general farmer (diversified) is the bone and sinew of the country. The occupation and development of lands further west and the competition which the farmers of the Mississippi Valley have experienced therefrom has taught them the necessity of maintaining the fertility of their farms by stock raising and diversified crops and of thus insuring a more certain income than can be expected from dependence upon one crop. Beef raising and dairying are steadily trespassing upon lands in the North and West heretofore given over to wheat, and the territory occupied by the general farmer is expanding proportionately.

One of the best evidences of the value of agricultural papers is the continuous use of such mediums by advertisers. Among those who have patronized the columns of the Farmers' Review for the past twenty-five years are such firms as the Bradley Manufacturing Company, Nordyke & Marmon, Fairbanks, Morse & Co., Borden & Selleck Company, Lyon & Healy, Jones of Binghamton, Montgomery Ward & Co., Youths' Companion, D. M. Ferry & Co., W. A. Burpee & Co., Storrs & Harrison Company, J. C. Vaughan and J. J. H. Gregory & Co.

The farmer relies upon the advice of his favorite agricultural paper and for that reason it should exercise great care and discretion in the acceptance of advertisements and its columns should be open only to reliable concerns. Advertisements which might be all right in a daily paper circulating among business

men accustomed to taking chances in making investments would not be right in an agricultural paper read by farmers who cannot afford to take such risks with their gains, which come slow as the product of hard work and which should be put by for a rainy day. The farmer needs above all a safe investment and is better off with a low rate of interest and good security than he would be with larger returns from a venture in which his principal might be endangered.

Speculative investments in stocks such as mining, oil wells, land syndicates, manufacturing and plantation development and others of similar character are all more or less uncertain as to results, and on that account advertising of that nature should not be encouraged in the

agricultural press. Perhaps my ideal of the advertising which should appear in an agricultural paper is too high. It certainly requires considerable moral principle to refuse contracts which aggregate thousands of dollars a year for the sake of protecting the interests of readers, but such has been the policy of the Farmers' Review. Perhaps it is not appreciated by other advertisers, but I believe its readers appreciate our efforts to keep its columns clean and save them from being betrayed by glowing but often misleading prospectuses. We should all have ideals in journalism if we are building for the future and not simply for the present advantage. The agricultural newspaper is now so firmly established that I believe we can afford to follow high ideals and that the results will be remunerative financial returns.

W

HEN I was small boy I was familiar with a stock grower and his family, who made no pretensions whatever to extraordinary taste in matters of dress, domestic appointments or farm equipment other than what is common to the class. But there was a chest of silver in the house that was made expressly for this stockman by a silversmith in an eastern city. The parlor carpet was an elaborate design in Brussels and the "spare room" furniture was hand made. That was a good long time ago (industrially), when luxuries came high; but there was on hand for outdoor use a handmade, two-seated carriage trimmed in real leather, and the harness had brass (we called it gold) mountings.

When I began to go about the world a bit I was entertained at a stockman's home where the guests enjoyed marble wash basins in a regular toilet room in the farm house, the dishes were imported china, and we were driven to and from the nearby railway station in a closed carriage, the "whip" being an artist of African descent.

There was more eclat about this stockman's home but perhaps a little less comfort than I met with later on a stock farm where the cattle in the barn had individual drinking cups, ate their food out of concrete mangers, and were tied to galvanized iron posts. In this latter case the expense was not all put on the cattle. The piano in the house was of Steinway make and rugs had taken the place of plebeian carpets as floor coverings.

Coming West I expected to find stockmen's homes rather destitute of comforts and evidences of the battle with the prairies still in sight. I had heard strange stories about western incongruities of living, which caused me to expect the unusual to happen at every turn of the road. For instance, I knew a case where an implement dealer in a frontier village had mortgaged everything he had on earth but his wife and six babies to the implement jobber, and at the conclusion of the transaction took the jobber's agent and the attorney to

his sod house home and entertained them at dinner served in five courses with wine between times! That appeared western in every sense of the term. But when I began to be about among western stockmen I got hardened to surprises.

One of my first recollections of western stockmen was being entertained over Sunday in a home where a Chicago architect had been employed to construct a villa on designs adapted from Moorish architecture; the toilet set in my bedroom bore a well known English potter's mark, and there was regular toilet paper in the closet.

That was down in the Missouri river country, where a neighboring stockman had just added a mite of $50,000 to the endowment fund of the college in his village. Among the sixty odd horses in this latter stockman's farm barn there were several head of standard bred animals, which were used for driving only, and I have seen but one collection of "rigs" which surpassed his in variety, viz., in the famous Busch stable in St. Louis. Of course, the stockman's stable outfit is not to be compared with the show equipage of the great brewer. But in number and variety of wheeled vehicles the stockman's necessities involved the purchase of a wide variety ranging from a road cart to the closed family carriage.

When I got out into the stockman's country pure and simple, where it is all stock and nothing else, I began to suspect I should meet plain living and the hard thinking which comes with strenuosity of labor and scarcity of railway communication. But imagine my surprise one day after a long dusty drive in the sand hills to be shown into a washroom where one might enjoy life in a genuine porcelain bathtub of the largest size and afterwards rest his bones on an "Ostermoor" mattress. In the east room of the sod ranch house I found a "craftsman" library table upon which was The Outlook, all Harper's publications and other leading magazines. The following day was rainy and after business had been transacted over telephone with some neighbors ten to fifty miles