The Russellville Democrat., 1877-10-04

PREMIUMS MT. Sam1 Brown offers the DEMOCRAT for one year as pre- mium to the party who will show the best and most abundant lot of sweet potatoes, produced in one hill, at the County Fair, Now be ready to trot out your potatoes and secure valuable premium.
 --The cotton shipments by rail from this station up to and including the lst day of this month amount to one hun dred and seventy-five bales, against 6G bales for same time last year. The wheat shipments amount to about 100 ear loads. This is ahead of any station on the L. R. & F. s. Railroad.
 -MR. EDITOR As slight token of our appreciation of your noble paper, please accept enclosed with co npli- ments of MRS. $. l.. LEATHERwooD, Mss MATTE CROMWELL.
 Ger. 1st, 1877.
 In grateful acknowledgment for the above compliment and the handsome and elegant cake which accompanied it, we make our most profound bow to our fair lady friends. We trust the DEMO- GRAF may ever prove worthy of the good opinion of our good friends.
 -NoN-ADvERTIsING MERCHANTs.- We are satisfied there is not merchant doing business in Russellville who would like to locate in town which would not support newspaper, and yet there are several firms here who withhold their advertisements and do not contribute cent toward support ing the DEMOCRAT. They seem to for get that if everybody acted just as they are doing our town would soon retro grade into utter insignificance, and the people would shun a town too stlngy and ignorant to support local press. We would like very much to have every business house in the county, but especially in Russellville represent ed in our advertising columns. We re- spectfully ask the non-advertisers to come up to our office and see what lib- eral rates we will give them.
 We wish every reader of the DEM ocRAT to carefully read the following lines taken from an exchange. It com bats with considerable vigor, the argu- ment that city papers are cheaper and better than county papers because they 1 give more columns of reading matter for the same money:
 ''Do the city papers," it asks, "ever give you any home news? Do they say anything in regard to your county ? Nothing. Do they contain notices of your schools. churches, meetings, im- provements and hundreds of other l local matters of interest, which your paper publishes without pay? Not an | item. Do they ever say word calcu- lated to draw attention to your County and it's numerous thriving towns, and aid in their progress and enterprise ? Not word. And yet there are men with such contracted views of this mat ter, that unless they are getting as many square inches of reading matter in their own as they do ill the city paper, they think they are not getting the worth of their money. It reminds us of the person who took the largest pair of boots in the box, simply because they cost the same as the pair much smaller, that fitted him."
 We see frem the Lawrence County Journal that one merchant of Walnut Ridge has the interest of his county paper enough at heart to solicit adver- tisements for it from the wholesale merchants of St. Louis, where he buys his goods. That is just exactly right. No country merchant should buy goods from a house that hasn't Hberality enough to support card in his local per.-GaZette.
 The merchants of Russellville own the Russellville DEMOCRAT entirely, but we don't believe they ever take time enough to think of the welfare of the paper as this Walnut Ridge merchant has done. The merchants who own this paper are patronizing numerous St. Louis, Louisville, Memphis, New Orleans, and Little Rock houses to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dol lars annually, and it would be nothing but reasonable and fair for them to ask the houses with which they deal to re- turn the compliment by inserting their cards in our paper. It will cost them only a trifle and the house which would refuse would prove itself un- worthy the patronage of our merchants. Will our Russellville merchants try this? We will wait and see.