One of my colleagues journeyed to Dublin in the hope of persuading Augustine Birrell to obtain government support for this Liberal organ.
He sent a somewhat startling telegram to Birrell at Dublin Castle.
“The lives of eight hundred men with their wives and children depend on the interview which I beg you to grant me to-day.”
Birrell was surprised, and granted the interview.
“Mr. Birrell,” said my grave and melancholy friend, placing a hat of high and noble architecture on the great man’s desk, “is _The Tribune_ going to die?”
“Sir,” said Mr. Birrell, twinkling through his eyeglasses, “may _The Tribune_ die that death it so richly deserves.”
I succeeded in holding up the sentence of doom for another fortnight, by the sportsmanship of a gallant old lady named the Countess of Carlisle. We had been conducting a temperance crusade which had earned her warm approval, and for the sake of that cause and her Liberal idealism, she offered to guarantee the men’s wages until the paper might be sold.
But it was never sold. The fatal night came when Franklin Thomasson, white and distressed, but resolute, faced his staff with the dreadful announcement that that was the last night. One man fainted. Several wept. Outside the printers waited in the hope that at this twelfth hour some stroke of luck would avert this great misfortune. To them it was a question of bread and butter for wives and babes.
With several colleagues I waited, smoking and talking, after the sentence had been pronounced. It seemed impossible to believe that _The Tribune_ was dead. It was more than the death of an abstract thing, more than the collapse of a business enterprise. Something of ourselves had died with it, our hopes and endeavors, our work of brain and heart. A newspaper is a living organism, threaded through with the nerves of men and women, inspired by their spirit, animated by their ideals and thought, the living vehicle of their own adventure of life. So _The Tribune_ seemed to us then, in that last hour, when we looked back on our labor and comradeship, our laughter, our good times together on “the rag,” as we had called it.
Long after midnight I left the office for the last time, with that friend of mine who had gone to Augustine Birrell, a tall, melancholy-mannered, Georgian-looking man, whose tall hat was a noble specimen of old-fashioned type.