Chapter 6 - Page 2

you'll have four thousand, and so on. At that
rate millions come easy."

"I'll give you a dollar for the idea," said the Bibliomaniac.

"No, I don't want to sell. You'll do to help develop the scheme. You'll
make a first-rate tool, but you aren't the workman to manage the tool. I
will go as far as to say, however, that without you and Mr. Pedagog, or
your equivalents in the animal kingdom, the idea isn't worth the fabulous
sum you offer."

"You have quite aroused my interest," said Mr. Whitechoker. "Do you
propose to start a new paper?"

"You are a good guesser," replied the Idiot. "That is a part of the
scheme--but it isn't the idea. I propose to start a new paper in
accordance with the plan which the idea contains."

"Is it to be a magazine, or a comic paper, or what?" asked the
Bibliomaniac.

"Neither. It's a daily."

"That's nonsense," said Mr. Pedagog, putting his spoon into the
condensed-milk can by mistake. "There isn't a single scheme in daily
journalism that hasn't been tried--except printing an evening paper in
the morning."

"That's been tried," said the Idiot. "I know of an evening paper the
second edition of which is published at mid-day. That's an old dodge, and
there's money in it, too--money that will never be got out of it. But I
really have a grand scheme. So many of our dailies, you know, go in for
every horrid detail of daily events that people are beginning to tire of
them. They contain practically the same things day after day. So many
columns of murder, so many beautiful suicides, so much sport, a modicum
of general intelligence, plenty of fires, no end of embezzlements,
financial news, advertisements, and head-lines. Events, like history,
repeat themselves, until people have grown weary of them. They want
something new. For instance, if you read in your morning paper that
a man has shot another man, you know that the man who was shot was an
inoffensive person who never injured a soul, stood high in the community
in which he lived, and leaves a widow with four children. On the other
hand, you know without reading the account that the murderer shot his
victim in self-defence, and was apprehended by the detectives late last
night; that his counsel forbid him to talk to the reporters, and that it
is rumored that he comes of a good family living in New England.

"If a breach of trust is committed, you know that the defaulter was the
last man of whom such an act would be suspected, and, except in the one
detail of its location and sect, that he was prominent in some church.
You can calculate to a cent how much has been stolen