petty politics had created and drive factions together in resistance to general oppression. So Brunswick and Wilmington found their factional quarrels would, if continued, result in injury to both; and in the course of a few years when their animosities had been mellowed by time, when the actors in the early struggle were dead, and when danger from a common enemy threatened the existence of both, their petty differences were buried and forgotten and the two towns stood side by side in the great war for freedom. This union was never broken, for the ties formed during those days of peril proved stronger than ever their differences had been, and Brunswick, abandoning the old site, united fortunes with Wilmington.

Edwin Lawrence Godkin: A Great American

Editor*

BY OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD,

Of the New York Evening Post

It is eminently proper that the task of preparing an adequate memoir of Edwin Lawrence Godkin, the most brilliant of the editors of the New York Evening Post, should have fallen into the hands of a successor in that editorial chair. But Mr. Rollo Ogden has, with characteristic modesty, written himself down merely as the editor of the two volume life of Mr. Godkin just issued by The Macmillan Company. He was quick to see that nothing could be said about Mr. Godkin that would be more interesting than the words of the man himself, and so he has refrained as much as possible from criticism or laudation or characterization, and let Mr. Godkin tell the story of his own life by giving extracts from his correspondence and writings. It is not often that a biographer is thus ready to subordinate himself; more often he is as eager to obtrude his own views of his subject as some dinner chairmen are ready to burst into oratory whenever they rise to their feet to introduce a speaker. Nor is it always possible to thus portray adequately the man whose story is to be told. But in this case the experiment has succeeded admirably. Mr. Ogden has given us a book so well put together as to record Mr. Godkin's many-sidedness, his patriotic service to his adopted country and the brilliancy of his pen, while furnishing the most delightful and entertaining reading. Even one tolerably familiar with Mr. Godkin's life and writings must find the volumes difficult to lay aside, and put down they cannot be without regret that there are not more of them. The later period of Mr. Godkin's life might well have received more attention; his attitude towards the war with Spain would seem, for instance, to have been well worth treatment, for his steadfast and consistent opposition to that war was altogether one of the finest and bravest passages in a brave man's life.

*Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin. Edited by Rollo Ogden. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907, 2 vols.

Like many another writer of high ideals and liberal views it was rarely Mr. Godkin's fate to be on the popular side of a question. He was of that minority which, although ever defeated, is ever successful by moulding public opinion, by raising the standards of politics and morals and then watching the people gradually adopt those same standards for which they first denounced or ridiculed the bearers. This is the true reward of the independent journalist and Mr. Godkin had it in full measure despite many disappointments of his latter years. He lived to see the success of that reform of the civil service which he was one of the first to advocate. When he took up the cudgels against Tammany he stood almost alone among journalists, and when that band of plunderers suffered its severe defeat of 1894 many of New York's foremost men and women gave the credit to Mr. Godkin and united in making a gift to him which expressed their belief and their gratitude in a tangible way. Before Mr. Godkin's death practically all of the press of New York was anti-Tammany. More than that, it had become unfashionable among journalists to sneer at the independent newspaper or, broadly speaking, to be else than independent. The thick-and-thin partisan paper is hardly to be found today, at least not in New York. It no longer pays, and this is true though the Tribune still survives; but even the Tribune has been known to bolt a regular Republican ticket. When one considers the violence of the denunciation of Mr. Godkin, George William Curtis, and the other Mugwumps who made bolting fashionable in 1884, it is obvious that the "world do move," even if we fail often to stop long enough to note its progress.

If still another example of the way the country has grown up to Mr. Godkin's teachings were needed, we might cite the changed public attitude towards Great Britain. Even a youth can remember when the twisting of the British Lion's tail was a familiar pastime of every buncombe statesman in Washington from Lodge down-or up. Mr. Godkin's pleas for friendship between the two countries, for a sane treatment of the points at issue, led to his being denounced right and left as a foreigner who ought to go back to England since this country was not good enough for him. The charge that Cobden Club gold was behind the Evening Post and other Free Trade or Tariff Reform newspapers was one

the high protective organs delighted in. When Godkin felt himself compelled to oppose President Cleveland's Venezuelan Message the assaults upon him broke out anew. To many his stand on this question was proof positive that he was at heart an Anglomaniac. If Mr. Godkin were writing today, he would find that the language of good manners and good will which he used towards England is now the common property of all journalists. We no longer accuse the British of secretly planning to sail into New York Harbor and take the sub-treasury before morning, but have transferred to Germany and Japan our insinuations and our accusations. To stand up for England is the popular thing; no editor would think of criticising Mr. Godkin now for applauding such of her institutions and policies as appealed to him.

That Mr. Godkin was quite aware that he would have to face aspersion of his motives and sincerity appears in Mr. Ogden's Life. When attacks of some dissatisfied stockholders were being made upon Mr. Godkin in 1866, he wrote to James Russell Lowell:

"I am made all the more sensitive in this matter because the disadvantages of being a stranger are great enough without having added to them the disadvantage of being denounced as a knave."

From Mr. Bowles, of the Springfield Republican, Mr. Godkin learned that the subject was discussed at a dinner party in Boston, at which it was said that

"An Englishman might be fit for the kingdom of heaven, but not to edit an American newspaper.' I said the joke was good, but would have more point if the most successful paper in America, in the common low sense of the word, and that whose influence has received the strongest acknowledgment from the public and from politicians, had not been conducted by a blackguard Scotchman."

As a matter of fact, throughout the Civil War Mr. Godkin rendered the most valuable service to his adopted country. His letters to the Daily News during that period are today models for correspondents the world over for their style, their intelligence and their evident mastery of the subjects which he treated; and not even the most jealous American can assert that anyone could have fought better for the cause of the North than did Mr. Godkin. It was in this wise that he wrote of Farragut:

"I cannot help recommending Farragut to the attention of those gentlemen in England who seem now to us here so badly off for naval

heroes on whom to expend their admiration. He has, I believe, never in his life attacked an unarmed enemy. He has never, I believe, burnt a merchantman, and thus brought ruin on unoffending non-combatants. He has no 'chronometers' in his cabin that have not been fought for or paid for. He has never avoided a fight when the chance of one was proffered him, and has never fought except against superior force. He has three times maintained with honor and success the cause of the old wooden ships, so dear to the hearts of Englishmen, against rams, ironclads, and earthworks, rifled guns and every other improved engine of destruction, and has on each occasion performed the most difficult of all naval exploits, in forcing the passage of narrow and obstructed channels under the fire of heavy armed forts at short range; and all this at an age when most men pass their time in their easy-chairs. How the soul of such a man must have beaten against the bars through the forty years of peace, of cruising on stations, of watching slave-traders, of fretting monotony in navy yards, which have rolled over his head! How much bitterness must be infused into the enjoyment of his present triumphs by the reflection that the opportunity of achieving them has come so late!" Recalling this war correspondence Mr. Godkin wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Daily News:

"No war since men began to fight has ever been so fully recorded. But no record or monument can give any one who did not live through it an adequate notion of the indomitable courage with which it was prosecuted, and of the determination never to submit or yield which sustained the Government. It was, more than any other, the heroic age of the American Commonwealth. The Revolution of 1776 was carried to a successful issue mainly through the perseverance of a few leading men; the war of 1861 was essentially a popular rising which carried the leaders forward often in spite of themselves."

Of Mr. Godkin's own share in this reporting Mr. J. E. Cairnes, the great English economist, wrote to him in 1865:

"Allow me to take this opportunity of expressing my sense of the high value of your correspondence in the Daily News during the last four years. I have read it from the first, scarcely, I think, omitting a letter, with constantly increasing confidence in the accuracy of your knowledge and the soundness of your judgment."

But even these quotations do not convey the delight, the pleasure and the humor of Mr. Godkin's letters, with which a large part of the second volume of his Life is filled. Mr. Ogden gives a number of examples of his wit, so often unconscious; and of his unexpected turns of phrase. He once wrote, "If I were to come into possession of the estate which the rightful owner has so long withheld from me, I would certainly move to Cambridge." Writ