Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/375

Rh he was making himself odious to a large mass of people. It was a new and strange road in journalism. It was an absolutely unheard-of road in a democracy; a road that had its dangers, as was shown in the case of one of Mr. Godkin's associates on the Nation, who so confused unpopularity with success, that every time the Nation lost a subscriber he chortled with glee.

Godkin was born in Ireland and was educated at Queen's College, Belfast, during a time when the philosophy of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham was in the ascendant, a fact that explains many of his own tendencies. After serving as correspondent to the London Daily News in the Crimean War, he came to America and, during the last three years of the Civil War, was the correspondent of the same paper.

For sixteen years, it was as the editor of the Nation that he was making his mark in the country, but it is as the editor of the Evening Post, with which the Nation was merged, that he will be best remembered.

The Nation was started in 1865 and merged with the Post in 1881, Godkin becoming associate editor of that paper with Carl Schurz as editor-in-chief. Two years later Schurz retired and Godkin became editor-in-chief, a position in which he remained until 1900, when he retired because of failing health. During that time the Evening Post was one of the world's famous newspapers; it was the leader in "reform" in the United States.

Godkin rose to real power at a time when looseness of political thinking marked journalism. At the root of much of the corruption of the times was unquestionably the spoils system, its sponsors grown arrogant through the fact that, as the Democratic party was discredited, the nation was under, not a two-party, but a one-party government.