The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1898-06-13

| New York, June S.-One OF the editors
| of a we'll known magazine said the
other day that the war would not prove
an unmitigated evil, for it must stop,
sooner or later, the rage for war stories.
That result has not been accomplished
yet. The writer's who have war stories
to offer, offer them before anything
else; and publishers who have war
stories to advertise, place them in the
forefront of their announcements. 1t
| is doubtful, though, whether war
] stories or any others are just now
! getting much read. / know it is the
| feeling of the trade that, except
extras" people are reading nothing;
\ and when you go to publishers seeking
| news of their coming ventures, they tell
you that they are going very slow and
| that the future is very uncertain. SO,
| if there is any ''ingloriouS Milton" seek
| ing, a loan of his friends, in order to
come up to New York with the manu-
script of a second Paradise Lost" he'll
! lose nothing by suspending his en-
| deavorS until fall or at least until a
| few more Spaniards have been killed.
l doubt il even the eaTt side Hebrew
tailor who writes so profoundly and
! sublimely in his ancestral tongue that
the best Harvard translator cannot do
| MIN Iul just uON Uoi445 q
great business; that is. in the literary
way.
A face more or less remarked in
newspaper and literary circles is the
disappearance of the name OF Carl
Schurz from the editorial columns of
Harper's Weekly the moment war with
Spain became declared fact As, for
some weeks previous, Mr.. Schurz had
in
subject of Cuba, and never in a tone
friendly to war; and. as the conductors
of the Weekly, the instant war was as
sured dispatched to the field a large
and distinguished corps Of correspond
entS and artists, and began TO adVer-
tise their journal as great pictorial
history of the conflict, the inevitable
inference from Mr.. SchurZ sudden
silence was that his views were no
linger grateful to the conductors. This
however. is in a way denied by them
The contract that they had with MIR
Schurz ran cut, they say, and simply
was not renewed. 1t may be so, bu;
we all know that. as a rule, contracts
don't expire so. aptly without certain
compulsion.
1t is likely that Mr. Schurz himself
was not unwilling to discontinue his
articles at this time. He is not mar.
who likes to be reserved in his express
sions of opinion. For one to whom the
earnings of his pen are a consideration,
he has maintained the independence OF
it rather extraordinarily. He has
never been a rich man, and since he
resigned the management OF one of the
transatlantic steamship companies
some years ago, his resources, l fancy,
have been distinctly limited. But he
has still eXacted, in any commission TO
write all the time that he, thought the
matter chosen meTited, and, In the
writing, has not sighted his personal
convictions. Mr. Schurz' special study,
for good many years now, has been
American history, although mis- writing
and speaking are still mainly OF cur
rent politics. He grows now to be an
old man, being within year of 10; but
he does not show it: his carriage is
erect and vigorous, his eye is bright,
and his step is light. Hc-lives, with
his daughters, in a modest apartment,
in the heart of the city. For some time
he occupied an historic old farm hous-
up the Hudson. an hour or two's
tourney from New York, and accounted
it an ideal situation: but he finally
wearied of it and came back to town.
It seems to be rather especially IN the
spring that the prize story contest
bursts into bloom. There are several
just now in progress, under the auspices
of important periodicals. 1t has fallen
to my lot, a number of times, to assist
in the conduct of such contests, and
they present to the man on the inside
some rather curious and interesting
facts. l never knew of one that yielded
directly enough TO pay for the labor
and expense of conducting it. If out of
thousand or two submissions an editor
secures a dozen stories really available,
he gets, 1 should say, the very maxi
mum of direct return. For the I'VE OF
six of this dozen TO which are allotted
the prizes, he pays anywhere from two
to ten times the ordinary price OF ac-
ceptable short stories by unknown au-
thors, and he pays no less than the or
binary price for the rest OF the dozen.
Add to this the cost of advertising the
contest, the cost of receiving, filing,
reading and returning thousand or
two manuscripts, and the cost OF con-
Quoting the correspondence that in
spite of all precautions, such contest
begets-and his prize stories, before he
has done with them, become about the
most sumptuous literature that the edf-
tor puts out Under such conditions,
Mr.. Kipling, in all his glory of % cents
a word, comes but little higher than
the fameless girl from Walla Walla.
And yet the popular impression Is that
editors originate prize Stoiy COli-SSt7 IL
order to get a store Of ''WhackinS"
good stories very cheap, and the sus-
picion Of "crookedness" and duplicity
that has generated in the hearts Of the
contestants by the time the contest
closes would, if gathered into enc
stream of energy, operate a heet of
first-cIass battleships.
The prize story is apt to be no more
of a prize in point of quality tran in
point of cheapness. In such prize story
contests as 1 myself have had hand
in, it was surprising how few perfectly
iiliterate and crazy manuscripts came
in Most of them were written with
fair propriety of expression, and were
in no respect ludicrous- You wondered,
as you went through them. that SO
many novices should have been able to
do so we'll Yet the very best among
them was only good; it was never
great; and I don't remember ever to
have read, anywhere, a prize story that
struck me as having positive distinc-
ton.
But the editors must find their profit
in it somew here people say. and they
are apt, in saying 1t. to give a toss of
the nose, as if they had in their. nos
trila the scent of some very Sefarious
business. The EDITORS profit is simply
this: Some advertisements for mis- pub
LEGATION (more or less, according to the
nature of the publication and the char