forced his harsh yet wholesome medicine upon the rebellious stomachs of Baltimore and New Orleans; and the North, lending a too-willing ear to much that came from the other section, rose at him "like mad" when he voted for the "back pay” and attempted to run for Governor of Massachusetts, as if to get a plaster for his sores.

But observe the sequel!

most always a conqueror.

This strange aggressive man is alHe wins his verdict because, so far, no one serious accusation has been proven against him. His foes are merciless, and he is more than merciless on them. But he does not "keep spite." To-day the South has no more practical or more useful friend. How grandly he came to the defence of the mistaken men implicated by Oakes Ames! He bides his time for self-defence and fair forgiveness. He strikes to hurt always, but he is always ready to heal the wound. His philosophy is evidently that as nobody is perfect, so none shall hold him to infallibility, or accuse him of what they themselves are not innocent. And with this theory he has fought his way through a career that may have been most inconsistent, but is not the less instructive because marked by many a bold and healthy deed, and as yet never disfigured by any proved act of injustice or dishonesty.

It is not often that two men of exactly the same name have figured so conspicuously in national affairs. I have seen father and son-Henry and A. C. Dodge, of Iowa-in the same Congress. I have seen three Washburn brothers in the same House. The Adams family have given the nation two Presidents. General Butler himself a member of the popular branch, while his son-in-law, General Ames, was a Senator from Mississippi; and young Hale, the Representative from the Fifth Maine district, was the son-in-law of Senator Chandler, of Michigan. But a coincidence like that of the two Benjamin F. Butlers I have noted is unusual, if not entirely without parallel.

X.

FORNEY'S "PRESS."

MACAULAY'S future New-Zealander, sitting on London Bridge pondering over the ruins of St. Paul's, is not a more curious fancy than the return of Benjamin Franklin to the walks of life, and the estimate he would place upon the ten thousand changes that have appeared since he was laid away in the little graveyard, corner of Fifth and Arch streets, in the city of Philadelphia, April 17, 1790. But nothing would surprise him so much as the growth of newspapers. In 1776, fourteen years before he died, there were only 37 newspapers in the colonies, of which 9 were in Pennsylvania, all of them weekly but the semi-weekly Philadelphia Advertiser. In 1800, ten years after his death, the number in the entire United States had increased to 200. In 1872 there were nearly four times as many publications in the city of Philadelphia alone as were published in the whole country in 1776, and within 57 as many as there were in the country in 1800; in other words, 143. In Pennsylvania, in 1874, there were 645, divided as follows: Daily, 70; tri-weekly, 2; semi-weekly, 2; weekly, 462; bi-weekly, 2; semimonthly, 14; monthly, 82; bi-monthly, 2; quarterly, 9; total, 645. Sum total, same year, of the whole nation, 6875. He would not only find everybody over fifteen taking or reading a newspaper, or hearing it read, but thousands rushing into the business itself; in fact, a nation literally wild on the subject of writing, printing, and publishing. There is an "organ" of somebody or something in every main street in a great city; one to three in every leading Northern town; one in every village of the slightest pretensions-all organs of somebody or something, grinding away in one chorus, sometimes discordant enough, but sufficiently harmonious on the single ego-the omnipresent axe, whether politics, law, divinity, medicine, science, art, agriculture,

horticulture, floriculture, geology, architecture; the axe English, German, French, Italian, Welsh, Scandinavian, Hebrew, and even Greek and Latin! Men start newspapers as they start collieries or banks or taverns, often without the slightest experience. Fortunes are poured into the insatiate crater, sometimes to come up into gold, but too often into ashes and ruins. Brains are taxed and tortured for infinite ideas and sensations. for endless machinery to circulate this reservoir of theory, speculation, and sometimes insanity. "Benjamin Franklin, printer," would stare at a posterity of which he was at least the nurse, if not the parent, and would hold up his hands in despair at this mighty mass of words, and in horror at the possibility of any human means for their digestion. And if in his curiosity he asked for the statistics of the world's printing-house, and were told that more books and papers were printed a hundred times over than there are millions of people on the habitable globe, I fear he would beg to be carried back to his quiet Quaker grave to avoid the certain collapse of a universe soon to be drowned in another deluge—of ink; smothered in one vast shroud of newspapers; or buried under a ponderous pyramid of books, uncut, unread, uncritised, and unspeakably damned.

I claim to know a little about newspapers, for I was fairly reared in a printing-office, having served as "devil," apprentice, and journeyman; as compositor, copy-holder, proof-reader, pressman, reporter, and finally editor. I have worked with the buckskin balls and pulled the old wooden Ramage; have made and pushed the glue roller; have worked off large editions on the Washington iron press; and have finally owned an eightcylinder lightning Hoe, which, with its modern rivals, more than realizes the fictions of the Arabian genii. Harnessed in steam, with lightning couriers, they "strike the loud earth breathless" with their thunder, and fill the very heavens with their millions of messengers. I have seen many a small sheet expand into a great blanket, and fold itself and die; and I have

watched the few firstlings of a penny paper till they came to thousands of households, like so many morning intelligences. What a school is a printing-office! What a short space in history is a generation; and yet what revolutions are crowded into it! The hours I spent at the case and the press were made delightful by the reading of the day. We had comparatively few newspapers, and so we read them through and through. There was no Philadelphia Ledger, but we regaled ourselves. with Joseph R. Chandler's "Letters from my Arm-chair," in the United States Gazette; there was no New York Tribune, but we drew inspiration from the splendid typography and nervous Saxon of Horace Greeley's Weekly New-Yorker; there were no Atlantic and Harper, but we revelled in the pages of Waldie's Library; we had no Macaulay or Bancroft to write us history, but we were satisfied with Hinton and Hildreth; we had no Dickens or Thackeray, or Charles Reade or Wilkie Collins, or Alfred Tennyson or Oliver Wendell Holmes, with their wonderful art, so rapid, dazzling, and supernatural; but we lived in the gorgeous world of Walter Scott, hung round with the marvellous drapery of Byron, and made musical with the enchanting melodies of Thomas Moore. Byron died in 1824, Scott in 1832, and Moore in 1852, and were the gods of the reading-world, and especially of the small gods in the printingoffices. Now we are so bombarded with books, and so ingulfed in newspapers, that we are lucky if we can read the title-pages of the first and the telegraphic head-lines of the second.

After being connected with two other newspapers, I resolved to establish The Press, March 14, 1857. It was a daring experiment. Without capital, though not without friends, I had nothing to begin with but good health, industry, some experience, and, above all, an enthusiastic love of my work. No man can make a successful newspaper, or anything else, without congenial assistants. I therefore cast about me for the best auxiliary literary and business talent, and I was most fortunate in securing it.

XI.

ACTORS AND ACTRESSES.-CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN.

A NEWSPAPER editor must know all sorts of people; but no class is more agreeable, and, in the long run, more honorable, than the players. They are the happiest men and women of the times, taken in the aggregate; and though living apart in a world of their own, with peculiar habits, and very generally misunderstood by the pietists, they can boast, at least, of conferring a great deal of pleasure, and of being, with few exceptions, kind and loyal to each other. They live in the midst of temptations, and many give way to the fascinations around them. And no wonder, when we remember that success is so rewarded with applause and riches. A handsome and gifted woman like Ellen Tree, Fanny Kemble, and Josephine Clifton, in their prime thirty years ago, or like Miss Neilson and Fanny Davenport in these days, is a source of infinite joy to herself and delight to others. Every female impulse and inclination is gratified; and especially the highest, that of being envied by their own sex and admired by the other. The coronet has glittered on the brow of many a poor actress in the Old World, whose only dowry was her loveliness and her genius. In this country a beautiful and accomplished woman never fails to make her fortune on the stage, and it is simply her own fault if she does not attain the highest social position. With the men, great talents go much further; they wield a larger influence outside of their profession. What public character, in any station, was ever more courted than David Garrick?-though in his case great gifts as an actor were supplemented by greater gifts as a wit and a dramatist. And who was more welcome in every circle than Joseph Jefferson, senior, or his grandson and namesake, the Joseph Jefferson of to-day? And who that remembers Tyrone Power, William Wood, William E. Burton, Edwin