At the end of the third month, the daily receipts equalled the daily expenditures.  A cheap police reporter was soon after engaged.  In the course of the next month, the printing-office was burnt, and the printers, totally discouraged, abandoned the enterprise.  The editor—­who felt that he had caught the public ear, as he had—­contrived, by desperate exertions, to “rake the Herald out of the fire,” as he said, and went on alone.  Four months after, the great fire laid Wall Street low, and all the great business streets adjacent.  Here was his first real opportunity as a journalist; and how he improved it!—­spending one half of every day among the ruins, note-book in hand, and the other half over his desk, writing out what he had gathered.  He spread before the public reports so detailed, unconventional, and graphic, that a reader sitting at his ease in his own room became, as it were, an eyewitness of those appalling scenes.  His accounts of that fire, and of the events following it, are such as Defoe would have given if he had been a New York reporter.  Still struggling for existence, he went to the expense (great then) of publishing a picture of the burning Exchange, and a map of the burnt district.  American journalism was born amid the roaring flames of the great fire of 1835; and no true journalist will deny, that from that day to this, whenever any very remarkable event has taken place in the city of New York, the Herald reports of it have generally been those which cost most money and exhibited most of the spirit and detail of the scene.  For some years every dollar that the Herald made was expended in news, and, to this hour, no other journal equals it in daily expenditure for intelligence.  If, to-morrow, we were to have another great fire, like that of thirty years ago, this paper would have twenty-five men in the streets gathering particulars.

But so difficult is it to establish a daily newspaper, that at the end of a year it was not yet certain that the Herald could continue.  A lucky contract with a noted pill-vender gave it a great lift about that time;[1] and in the fifteenth month, the editor ventured to raise his price to two cents.  From that day he had a business, and nothing remained for him but to go on as he had begun.  He did so.  The paper exhibits now the same qualities as it did then,—­immense expenditure and vigilance in getting news, and a reckless disregard of principle, truth, and decency in its editorials.

Almost from the first month of its existence, this paper was deemed infamous by the very public that supported it.  We can well remember when people bought it on the sly, and blushed when they were caught reading it, and when the man in a country place who subscribed for it intended by that act to distinctly enroll himself as one of the ungodly.  Journalists should thoroughly consider this most remarkable fact.  We have had plenty of infamous papers, but they have all been short-lived but this.  This one has lasted.  After thirty-one years of life, it appears to be almost as flourishing to-day as ever.  The foremost of its rivals has a little more than half its circulation, and less than half its income.  A marble palace is rising to receive it, and its proprietor fares as sumptuously every day as the ducal family who furnished him with his middle name.