the London Spectator and the Saturday Review already supplied to the British intellectual public. He talked his scheme over with his friends, particularly with Olmsted and Norton, who felt great enthusiasm for it. But they lacked capital. Finally in 1863 Olmsted undertook to raise the necessary money and to act as manager of the journal; he was called to California, however, Godkin himself could not find the requisite backers, and so the project failed. Rather let us say it lay dormant, for Godkin never abandoned it; and in May, 1865, the war being ended, Norton and Charles Miller McKim, a Pennsylvania Quaker, much interested in the future of the freed negroes, collected sufficient capital to float the enterprise. One half the amount came from Norton and his friends in Boston, and a quarter each from Philadelphia and from New York. The purpose of the journal as stated in its prospectus was:

To furnish intelligent, accurate, and temperate discussions of topics of the day.

To maintain, diffuse, and promote truly democratic principles and action in this country.

To promote sympathy with, and justice towards the laboring class at the South, as a matter of vital interest to the nation at large.

To call attention to the political need of popular education, and to the danger of neglecting it in any part of the Union.

To collect and diffuse information as to the condition and prospect of the Southern States and of the progress of the colored people there.

To promote good criticism of books and works of art.

In the list of prospective contributors were seven members of the Saturday Club, many of whose members also had subscribed to its stock. The title chosen was the Nation, and after the first year E. L. Godkin & Co. superseded 'The Nation Association' as its publishers.

The first number of the Nation was issued on July 5, 1865, and from that time on for fifteen years the journal appeared weekly with Godkin in command and Wendell Phillips Garrison as his assistant editor. More than once its resources ran low, and suspen

sion if not extinction seemed probable. But always the pluck and resourcefulness of its chief and the loyalty of his friends carried it through the straits. From the outset the relations between the Nation and Harvard were close; and this was natural in view of Godkin's friendship with Lowell and Norton, and of the fact that many of his writers belonged to the rising group of Harvard men. It was not surprising therefore that in 1870, the year after Mr. Eliot became President of Harvard and the new era dawned, Godkin should have been offered a chair of history at Harvard. That he seriously considered accepting it his letters indicate; but as soon as the offer was known he had many friendly protests from his intimates who dissuaded him from abandoning the Nation. Lowell told him that he had made that organ unique, that nobody could fill his place in that honorable post, and that the Nation was worth many professorships. So he declined. In 1871 Harvard bestowed upon him the honorary degree of Master of Arts.

In 1875 his wife died, and two years later he settled in Cambridge with his only son. There he remained until 1881, when together with Carl Schurz and Horace White (formerly editor of the Chicago Tribune) he bought the New York Evening Post and sold the Nation to the Evening Post Publishing Company, of which Henry Villard was chief owner. This transaction caused Godkin to remove to New York, since he could not conduct a daily newspaper by mail from Cambridge. Indeed his absence from the great city had suggested to some readers of the Nation — persons, let us say, of preternaturally acute critical sensitiveness-that Godkin's work began to fall off, began to lose edge and vigor, and to take on a certain unvirile blandness which, they supposed, flourished in academic circles. As to this I do not pretend to say; but it is obvious that Godkin had many more contacts with all sorts of men in New York than he could have in Cambridge. Thenceforward until 1899, when Godkin, owing to rapidly failing health, retired from both journals, the Nation appeared as the weekly adjunct of the Post. Garrison edited it, selecting from the paragraphs and editorials published daily in the Post those which he thought important enough to be perpetuated in the Nation. He managed also the literary and art departments, the reviews of which ap

peared first in the Nation and then were reprinted in the Post. One heard the criticism that the editorial leaders in the Nation now lacked some of the reflection and sober second thought which they had had before the merger. Arguing on a-priori grounds this seems plausible; because when Godkin wrote his leaders for the Nation he had three or four days, or perhaps a week, in which to meditate on them; whereas when he wrote similar leaders for the Post on the most striking event or topic in the morning papers, his article had to be finished and put in type between nine and eleven o'clock each morning. I must confess that I seldom detected any falling off in judgment or style myself; but here is a matter which may be left to future Ph.D. candidates to investigate.

The amazing thing was that three such dominating men as Godkin, Schurz, and White, each of whom was well advanced in middle life and had long been his own master in very important editorial organs, should work harmoniously together; and in fact their alliance had lasted only two years when Carl Schurz, disagreeing with his colleagues on a matter concerning their policy toward the labor question, retired. Horace White, however, continued on the Post until 1903, and, so far as the public knew, there was no discord in the management. But to the end of his connection every one regarded Godkin as the prevailing and controlling influence of the editorial page of the Post.

Outside of his editorial work only a few events require to be mentioned here. In June, 1884, Mr. Godkin married Miss Katherine Sands, and they lived for several years at 115 East 25th Street, New York. He made frequent journeys to England and the Continent, mostly in order to recuperate from ill-health, caused by overwork. As he could not do things by halves he often had to stop altogether, exhausted by exertion which in his earlier days he carried with ease.

At length in 1899 he retired from the Nation and the Post; but for some time afterward he contributed a special weekly article over his own signature to the Post, and in these articles can be found many of his recollections and more personal opinions. Besides his history of Hungary he published three books, 'Reflections and Comments' (1895); 'Problems of Modern Democracy'

(1896); 'Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy' (1898). These contain many of his articles which first appeared in magazines, and some of his longer papers in the Nation. How indefatigable a writer he was can be inferred from the fact that his magazine articles number nearly fifty in addition to the hundreds of columns of political comments and leaders which he wrote every year for the Nation.

In 1901 he and Mrs. Godkin went to England, and for him the succeeding year meant slowly failing health. His feebleness was somewhat solaced by seeing old friends and old scenes. And then on May 21, 1902, he died painlessly at Greenway on the river Dart in Devon. He illustrated, as his biographer Mr. Ogden says, what he had once written, 'the power of meeting death calmly — that noblest of the products of culture.'

My personal acquaintance with Mr. Godkin was very slight. His son, who was an intimate classmate of mine at Harvard, invited me to dine with his father at their house at 59 Kirkland Street. Mrs. Godkin had recently died. Having spent my youth in Europe, I came to college with but a vague idea of the Nation, and even less of its editor; and I remember little about that dinner except that I felt ill at ease. Eight years later, when I was engaged in editorial work in Philadelphia, Mr. Godkin telegraphed me to come over to New York and confer with him about accepting an editorial position on the staff of the Evening Post. I went, and lunched with him and his second wife- whom I remember as most affable — and we talked about the proposed work. He was brusque, not inclined to propitiate, and dismissed me with businesslike curtness. On my return to Philadelphia I waited week after week for a note from him giving his decision, but no note has ever come to this day. Silence gave his decision. As a young man, I felt the discourtesy for a while, but this feeling did not then nor has it ever since, lessened my admiration for Godkin's great service as a journalist, a public moralist and a shaper of sound intellectual opinion. Such was my admiration for him, and so greatly did he interest me as a real figure of a man, that I regretted after his death, when I was urged to write his biography, that circum

stances compelled me to decline that honorable task. He was a great subject for a biographer!

Many expressions from his friends and fellow workers illustrate the qualities which made him transcendent as an editor and endeared him to his intimates. To strangers he showed usually that brusque side which is much commoner in Britishers than in us, the more placating Americans. Our placability often veneers a nature as steadfast and unyielding as Godkin's own, but it does not reveal immediately to the touch-and-go acquaintance the reserve of force, and of fight, behind it. Mr. Norton, for instance, was as inexorable as Mr. Godkin, although the superficial observer, judging only from Norton's urbanity, might not have suspected it.

I rate Godkin as the foremost American newspaper editor during the last half of the nineteenth century; and in making the estimate I do not forget Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, Raymond of the Times, Dana of the Sun, and Samuel Bowles of the Springfield Republican. The only one of these who approached Godkin as a writer was Charles A. Dana, but he devoted his talents, political and literary, to making ‘vice attractive,' as President Roosevelt remarked, and to supporting Tammany and the other abominations against which Godkin fought. The paragraphs, twenty or thirty lines long, which he wrote week after week in the Nation summed up in unmatched compactness and force whatever topic he dealt with. They were as hard as crystals and as clear. No other journalist among his contemporaries had his art of laying bare the truth by a flash of irony or by telling an apposite story. Perhaps he indulged too frequently his habit of 'damnable iteration.' If he once took up any fallacy or the person who preached it, he never let go; and, so easy-going, so tepid in their moral enthusiasm, and so sentimentally irrational are average men that sometimes they tired of Godkin's moral indignation; and they even expressed pity for the victims whom he pummelled without flagging and without mercy. So philanthropic ladies send bouquets to murderers in the mistaken idea that they thereby show worthy sympathy for those who suffer. Even his friends disapproved occasionally of his over-lavish sarcasm. But the gladiator