HOW SHALL THE PAPER BE SUSTAINED?
By James White
Five thousand copies, at $2.00 a volume of fifty numbers, will meet all the expenses of publishing. And this estimate is considerably lower than the price of any other paper of the kind published on the Pacific Coast. This would make the SIGNS to our Missionary Societies at $4.00 per hundred copies. We design that the paper shall contain reading matter better in point of variety and interesting news of the progress of the cause than what our tracts contain. The SIGNS is just what our friends should circulate everywhere in connection with their efforts to obtain subscribers. Quantities can be sent to any bona fide subscriber, post paid, at the new low rates of postage. We will therefore send the SIGNS by mail, post paid, for $4.00 per hundred copies. Nos. 17, 18, 19, are excellent. No pains will be spared to make the SIGNS just such a paper as our friends will take pleasure in circulating everywhere. We shall very soon increase the edition to 5,000 copies. We shall encourage its circulation from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and everywhere that the English language is read. We return to our first plan, and now call on our eastern friends for donations, from one dollar to one hundred, to aid in publishing the SIGNS, and to purchase presses, types, &c., complete, to furnish the new office building. Some of our conferences pledged liberally last summer for this object. And by reason of bad management, confusion has been created. We now call on all to help us with free-will offerings. We press none, but invite all, to act of their free will in the fear of God. Brethren in the ministry in all the Eastern States are requested to act as agents for the SIGNS. They will please send subscribers and money. Let all who read our paper with pleasure and profit judge of their duty to help sustain it. They can pay the subscription price, or donate more largely. We are sending the SIGNS to hundreds, and paying postage, from whom we have heard nothing. If they wish to read our paper we hope to hear from them. If they take no interest in it, after receiving more than a dozen numbers, they will please ask the postmaster to request it discontinued. We take no pleasure in furnishing the SIGNS to those who do not want it. We appeal to personal friends to assist us just now. We have undertaken a great enterprise, and ask co-operation. We are now publishing on our own individual responsibility. And the publishing house will be built this spring. The receipts from week to week are too small to save us from walking much of the way by faith. It is true that sufficient has been subscribed in California to purchase the site and to put up the building. But it is a fact that many who liberally pledged means are in debt, and are paying high rates of interest. These willing friends must not be pressed. In time they will all come up nobly to the work. We shall go right forward publishing and building. And we shall expect co-operation of personal eastern friends, and shall be happy to reciprocate their liberalities by attending their annual encampments, and in rendering all other assistance in our power.