James Parton, The life of Horace Greeley

[401] for which superiority is here asserted. To-day, it happens, that the paper contains nothing literary. In a daily paper, news has the precedence of everything, and a review of an epic greater than Paradise Lost might be crowded out by the report of an election brawl in the Sixth Ward. Thus, a poor author is often kept in trembling suspense for days, or even weeks, waiting for the review which he erroneously thinks will make or mar him.

Like People, like Priest, says the old maxim; which we may amend by saying, Like Editor, like Correspondent. From these “Letters from the people,” we infer, that when a man has something to say to the public, of a reformatory or humanitary nature, he is prone to indite an epistle “ to the Editor of the New York Tribune,” who, on his part, in tenderness to the public, is exceedingly prone to consign it to the basket of oblivion. A good many of these letters, however, escape into print—to-day, four, on some days a dozen. The London letters of the Tribune are written in London, the Paris letters in Paris, the Timbuctoo letters in Timbuctoo. This is strange, but true.

In its editorial department, the Tribune has two advantages over most of its contemporaries. In the first place, it has an object of attack, the slave power; and secondly, by a long course of warfare, it has won the conceded privilege of being sincere. Any one who has had to do with the press, is aware, that articles in newspapers are of two kinds, namely, those which are written for a purpose not avowed, and those which are written spontaneously, from the impulse and convictions of the writer's own mind. And any one who has written articles of both descriptions is aware, further, that a man who is writing with perfect sincerity, writing with a pure desire to move, interest, or convince, writes better, than when the necessities of his vocation compel him to grind the axe for a party, or an individual. There is more or less of axe-grinding done in every newspaper office in the world; and a perfectly independent newspaper never existed. Take, for example, the London Times, which is claimed to be the most incorruptible of journals. The writers for the Times are trammeled, first, by the immense position of the paper, which give to its leading articles a possible influence upon the affairs of the world. The aim of the writer is to express, not himself, but England; as the Times is, in other countries, the