then sprung up, but the American consul having come to the conclusion that Bangkok was an unhealthy city for newspaper enterprise the Monitor went out with the mango showers. Rev. Sam J. Smith then stepped to the front and started the Siam Weekly Advertiser, which he continued to publish for seventeen years, more as an advertising sheet than a disseminator of news, but supposing that the era of libel had passed he was startled when he was brought up by a round turn and met the fate of his predecessors, for when he was called on to pay $1,500 by the English consul for publishing a communication that he had not written or even endorsed, not libelous in a general sense, he shut up shop and said the paper could go to a warmer place than Siam, that the proud privilege of running a paper was exhausting his exchequer and he would have no more of it, in fact it had never paid. This ended the efforts of the missionaries to keep up a paper.
Appreciating the power of the press, if properly handled, the Siamese officials endeavored to keep the Advertiser afloat by offering to subscribe for one hundred and fifty copies, provided that they would be allowed to exercise a censorship over its columns, but the proprietor had had enough of glory and the paper still remains with the honored dead. Then an eccentric genius, a cosmopolitan, as much at home in Paris as at Singapore, who had had some experience on the Hong Kong papers, drifted into Bangkok, stood in with the Siamese officials and now publishes, in fact, the first newspaper that has ever been published in the city. During its existence it has published more libelous articles than any of its predecessors, but it still lives. To counteract
