... speculations. At the end of a few months it was discovered that the manager of the People's Journal kept no books, and that the affairs of the paper were in hopeless confusion. William Howitt, finding himself responsible for the losses on the venture, tried to cure the evil by a hair of the dog that had bitten him. He withdrew from the People's Journal, and, with Samuel Smiles as his assistant, started a rival paper on the same lines, called Howitts Journal. But, as Ebenezer Elliott, the shrewd old Quaker, ... — Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston