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Show JAMES GORDON BENNETT. lames Gordon Bennett's eccentricity in the conduct of a newspaper may be explained by his aversion to sustained effort; that is to say, hard work. When he was 30 years old he found himself much in the position of a sybaritic syba-ritic crown prince with an empire on his hands. Having pursued the paths of pleasure with a devotion which he could not give to toil, he invented the strange device of managing his newspaper from Europe, and he established a Pais edition edi-tion to give himself prestige in France, where he made his home, and also to give himself an excuse for separating himself from the work in New York. His father, born poor, had built up a great newspaper as an aspiring and hard-working monarch might build an empire. The graceless crown prince, although ho had inherited a strong constitution con-stitution and many commanding gifts of the mind, was a victim of the silver spoon. For many years his throne room was at No. 120 Champs Elysees, Paris. There he received each day from New York a newspaper marked- so that he could tell which reporter or editor was responsible re-sponsible for each articles. Like an autocrat, ho employed the mailed fist without rhyme or reason. Frequently Fre-quently he cabled across the ocean to discharge a police reporter or some obscure editor, but once in a while perhaps when the champagne and lobster lob-ster of the night before still harassed his nerves he would order practically an entire staff discharged from the Herald or the Evening Telegram, a light pink paper which was notable for a daily edition at 10 p. m. Once he discharged all of the staff of the Telegram except the managing editor, and assigned him to the unpleasant un-pleasant task of recruiting a new staff within three or four days. Whether he obtained a better staff than the old one tho story does not tell, but we are justified jus-tified in venturing the guess that he did not. In later years other newspapers began be-gan to dim the luster of the Herald's prestige, and the autocrat of the Champs Elysees or the Villa Namguna lost the inspiration of those earlier times in which he dispatched an expedition expe-dition to discover the north pole and sent one of his reporters, Stanley, to find Livingstone in "Darkest Africa." |