Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/70

44 gaining experience such as had fallen to the lot of no other man in the colonies. He tells us himself that he studied style by copying Addison and Steele when a mere child. With his brother, he had suffered because of the autocratic spirit of the times when James Franklin and his associates were making, in their small way, an interesting beginning in the battle for a free press.

He knew the Bradfords, William and Andrew, personally. He knew the personnel of the printers in the colonies as probably no other man did. He had had an interesting and intensive training in England for eighteen months, and the philosophical bent that he showed in the first essay written for his brother's paper, the New England Courant, was now to be given full sway, with a development that was to hold two continents in rapt admiration and a result that was to make his native country his everlasting debtor, for Franklin, the great editorial-political genius used the success that came to him to swell the current of influence that was making for liberty and democracy.

In the meantime the advent of Bradford the elder marked the beginning of truly historical developments in the colony of New York.