William Alexander Linn, Horace Greeley Founder and Editor of The New York Tribune

[15] after his death. He always felt a responsibility for the kind of journal that he gave to his subscribers. “I think that newspaper reading is worth all the schools in the country,” he told a committee of the House of Commons, of which Cobden was a member, when invited, in London in 1851, to give his views on “taxes on knowledge,” and he was too honest to offer his readers anything less than the best that he could supply. Some advice to a country editor, written by him in 1860, could hardly be improved upon. His first principle laid down was that “the subject of deepest interest to an average human being is himself; next to that, he is most concerned about his neighbor.” He therefore told his correspondent that, if he would make up at least half his paper of local news, secured by “a wide-awake, judicious correspondent in every village and township in your county, nobody in the county can long do without it. Make your paper a perfect mirror of everything done in your county that its citizens ought to know.” This covers the whole ground of breadth and restriction. Next, he would have the editor take an active part in promoting all “home industries,” in which he included local fairs and new business enterprises of all kinds. Thirdly, and