Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/353

Rh of the man in office—the blindness of those in power, competing with men who had no such weakness and who still had the eagerness of unfulfilled ambition. It illustrates the truth of the statement that great journalism is journalism in attack; great journalism is never journalism in office.

The month after Raymond's removal, the New York State Republican Convention was held, and both Weed and Raymond were conspicuously absent. They had risen to the zenith of political power, but had fallen; their fall was due less to a political catastrophe than to an awakening of the moral sense of the people.

Immediately after the Civil War,—as there is likely to be after every war, after every great moral ebullition—there had sprung up, in the wake of material progress, an indifference to the finer questions of morality. For twenty-one years the struggle on slavery had so engrossed the nation that many other important problems had been neglected—practically pushed aside.

The attention of the nation had been concentrated on the larger issues, and unscrupulous men had availed themselves of the opportunities afforded by that concentration to encompass their own ends, often to the detriment of the public welfare.

"Great projects of money-making throve and multiplied," says the biographer of Samuel Bowles, "corporations enriched by the government used their wealth to corrupt legislation; the tendency to speculate was stimulated by a currency of fluctuating value; business expansion and private extravagance went on till checked by the disaster of 1873. Bestowal of public office as a reward for partisan service, an evil of long standing, had been confirmed when Lincoln virtually transferred the patronage from his overworked Administration to the Republi-