It was in this field of provincial journalism that Mr. Bowles's work was done. Of the old-fashioned country newspaper he once wrote:

"News had grown old when it was published. The paper did the work of the chronicler or annalist merely, and was the historian of the past rather than a spectator and actor in the present. It was not upon the printed column that the events of the day struck the heart of the living age, and drew from it its sparks of fire. In those times that place of contact was found in the personal intercourse of men. News ran then along the street, from mouth to mouth; the gossiping neighbor carried it; the post-rider brought it into the groups gathered at the village store. By and by came the heavy gazette, not to make its impression but to record the fact. The journalism was yet to be created that should stand firmly in the possession of powers of its own; that should be concerned with the passing and not with the past; that should perfectly reflect its age, and yet should be itself no mere reflection; that should control what it seemed only to transcribe and narrate; that should teach without assuming the manners of an instructor, and should command the coming times with a voice that had still no sound but its echo of the present."

Among the country newspapers of its time, the Weekly Republican, before 1844, stood well. It had outlived and absorbed several rivals during its twenty years' existence, and thus had satisfied the test of the survival of the fittest. But one who now turns over its old files will find scanty material even for the chronicler or annalist. A file of the Weekly Republican for any of the years of its later history affords a most graphic and vivid weekto-week history of the period. These volumes will be a rich treasury to the future historian. But, between the years 1826 and 1844, the pages of the Republican throw little light upon the social life of the times. It has two chief staples-political discussions, and scraps of miscellaneous unassorted news. The politics are more vigorous

than lucid. Personal and party names do service largely in place of rational discussion. Nothing is more characteristic of the younger Bowles's methods in his maturity than his constant reference to general principles in his writing,-the special question or incident being illumined by its relation to some broad idea. In his work we have continually, "philosophy teaching by example." But the father's paper followed largely the easier method which assumes that the editor and his readers are of the same mind, and simply reiterates under a variety of forms that they are right and their opponents wrong. Political discussion forms the central interest, and occupies half the space, of the Weekly Republican before 1844. For the rest it is filled generally with some selected "tale"; with an odd collection of miscellaneous news items, in which "shocking accidents," "mysterious occurrences" and "sad calamities" predominate; and with scraps of literary and religious matter. There is an occasional piece of local news, meagerly told, sometimes with mild attempt at humor. But there is nothing like a systematic presentation of the week's occurrences even in the town and neighborhood, still less in more distant fields. In reading the meager chronicle one is moved to ask, "Did nothing happen in those days? Or did no one know how to tell what happened?"

CHAPTER VI.

THE FIRST YEARS OF WORK: ASHMUN AND CALHOUN.

S

UCH was the general condition of American journalism when Mr. Bowles began his work, and such was the paper which was his school and his basis to build upon. The first development which he showed was in solid rather than brilliant qualities. In the Words of one who knew him long and well, "The fire, spirit, life, which in his prime he was so full of, did not appear in his early years. There was not much to develop him at first. He went away from home little, and he had not an inspiring circle of acquaintances. He was plodding, industrious, saving,-that was his reputation. But he whom in later years we knew as Sam Bowles was not there, not even the suggestion of him."

In these first years, he was under the pressing necessity of unresting work. The best editorial writing at this time was done by one or two men outside of the office. Except this, almost all the business and editorial labor came upon father and son, and most heavily upon the son. He worked late at night; vacations and holidays were unknown; of recreation and general society he had almost nothing.

The first special power he showed was in the faculty of seeing a thing clearly and telling it as he saw it. He was quick to find out what was going on. His big eyes

- of so dark a brown that they often seemed black - saw everything that men were doing about him. In his news items the community began to find a little daily history of itself. Springfield was probably in reality much the same town in 1848 as in 1843; but as reflected in the Republican it has become a much more interesting place.

Mr. Bowles was at the outset a slow writer and a slow thinker. Even his news reports were written patiently and laboriously. His epigrammatic brilliance, his genius for terse and telling phrase, belonged altogether to his later development. So did his power of managing men, -a power compounded of magnetism and tact. His first foreman had been his room-mate as a boy, and, being a stiff-grained Yankee, was not very amenable to the management of his old companion, and gave him many a troublous hour. The editor managed to hold his own, but at home he sometimes cried with vexation over the difficulties of the composing-room.

He seems to have had no marked period of mental fermentation and deep questioning. Among his contemporaries in New England, there was much unsettling and relaying of foundations. Emerson and Carlyle were uttering their quickening words. Transcendentalism was at its height, and all manner of reforms and agitations were in the air. The Abolition movement was stirring the social and political world with thrills of wrath and of sympathy. It was a yeasty time: intellectual America was in the stage of uneasy adolescence, with its passion, self-questioning, aspiration, and revolt. A few years later, no man was more sensitive to the moral atmosphere of the community than Mr. Bowles. But in his youth he was not especially stirred by what we now look back to as the vital and prophetic forces of the time. With those forces, as social influences, he did not come in close contact. The town he lived in was VOL. I.-3

provincial as no place is provincial in these days of railroad and telegraph. The movements of thought, which, as we look back on them, appear like tidal waves agitating the whole community, were in reality narrow currents, which left the greater part of society a long time unmoved. Boston and its neighborhood awoke to the new life long before the rest of the country. The social atmosphere of the Connecticut Valley was conservative and in a degree materialistic. It was little responsive to the passionate cry of the Abolitionists. That dryness of the old New England life, that want of color and warmth and spiritual insight, against which Emerson and Thoreau and the Transcendentalists revolted, so pervaded and incrusted the general community that only the more sensitive and restless spirits answered to the call for something better. (At the time of life when a young man is most liable to questioning and mental unrest, Mr. Bowles was held too closely by work and responsibility to have any leisure for exploring excursions into the infinite. His whole early bent was practical rather than speculative. He found his great interest, beyond his personal work, in that broadest of practical subjects, the political life of the nation. His finest work as a reporter was his account of political conventions; and his journeys to these, with the contact into which they brought him with leading men, were a great step in that intercourse with humanity in which lay much of the education of his maturity. He had grown up in a family and a community in which the solid and practical qualities were more cultivated than the graces and amenities. He had by nature an instinct to claim the first place; and the early struggle for success, in which every foot of ground had to be fought for, was not likely to lessen that disposition. His associates found him sometimes selfish and sometimes crusty. The sweeter and