in Franklin Pierce an obscure candidate, but they were more harmonious than the Whigs. They had re-absorbed the New York seceders to Free-soilism in 1848, and they were more trusted than the Whigs by the South. The Free-soilers nominated John P. Hale. Their platform re-affirmed that freedom must be regarded as national and slavery sectional; pronounced slavery a sin against God and a crime against man; denounced the Fugitive Slave law, and declared that no human law can be a finality; and gave the watchword of "Free soil, free speech, free labor, free men!" This became the rallying cry of the Republican party only four years later; and the principles thus announced closely resembled those applied by the Republican party to somewhat altered circumstances, save that the latter never made an issue of the Fugitive Slave law, and was much more explicit and careful in affirming the local rights of slavery than the Free-soilers ever troubled themselves to be. But the latter party never had much popular strength, and now, deprived of its Democratic allies of four years earlier, its vote fell off from that of 1848 by 100,000, and reached only 156,000. The Democrats swept the country, carrying all but four states (Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee), though with a popular vote only a very little larger than their two opponents combined.

The Republican's tone through this campaign of 1852 was unreservedly and heartily Whig. The first stage of its political history ends here. In comparison with Mr. Bowles's course in later years, it is noticeable how thoroughly during this period he was swayed by the allevance and enthusiasm of a party, when that party had ner any distinctive principles or any inspiring

ardor of the Republican for the Whig party sers was in reality, if analyzed, an ardor partly

for individuals,-Webster, the great light of the system, and Everett, Choate, Ashmun, Winthrop, and the rest, revolving around him,-partly for a name, a tradition, an association, which had imperceptibly become emptied of any solid idea or vital principle. This enthusiasm for a party name and associations, in distinction from an intelligent attachment to ideas and principles, dominated Mr. Bowles in these earlier years; in later years it was against just such unreasoning partisanship that he was to do effective service. As a young man he had not yet broken away from the materializing influences which prevailed in the community about him. That ardor of intellectual and moral progress which burned on the Massachusetts coast had scarcely kindled in the valley of the Connecticut. The great men of the region, the "river-gods," were very far from moral enthusiasts. The "respectable" sentiment of the town was stronger against George Thompson than against the men who mobbed him. When on that occasion the pastor of the Unitarian church, Rev. George Simmons, spoke manfully for the rights of free speech, it cost him his dismissal from the parish. He was on a sick-bed when the church meeting was held, and his physician warned those present that any hostile action on their part at that time might endanger his life, but in the face of this warning they passed a vote of dismissal. Mr. Bowles started on a level with his environment. The sensitiveness to the moral element in politics, the insight into the real meaning and drift of things, were to be developed in him later.

CHAPTER XII.

THE JOURNALIST AT WORK: HIS LIEUTENANTS.

THE

HE course of the Republican upon great public questions can be briefly recorded, but it is impossible to record, almost impossible to suggest, the history of the paper itself, as a daily chronicle of news and opinion. As one turns the pages of its old files, at a distance of many years, there is in them a vigor and sparkle which fascinate. Read now, it is history in its most vivid and stirring form. Read then, as the sheets yet damp from the press were caught up and eagerly scanned by thousands of eyes, it was history in the very making. These bird's-eye glimpses of the world's life for a day, these stories of myriad activities of good and evil, these quick suggestive paragraphs, stamped an influence on the mind and character of the people who read them. The newspaper was a factor in the lives of individual and the community more potent than ey knew.

The especial genius of the Republican and its editor lay in giving the news. Said the prospectus of December 23, 1851:

"We aim first of all to make a live newspaper,-to give everything in this region that people want, briefly, intelligently, succinctly stated-to weed out the verbiage and present the kernel. After news,-which is the great distincVOL. I.-7

97

Characterist

If he Republi

tive object of the Republican, and to which all other things must bend, we aim to discuss politics, morals, religion, physics,everything in fact which editors may discuss nowadays,-as honestly, fairly, frankly, and intelligently as our abilities, knowledge, and time will admit."|

The decade in which the telegraph came into use was the swift and wonderful adolescence of the news-gathering function of journalism. The Republican had its first telegraphic dispatches in the latter part of 1846. An editorial on "The Newspaper," January 4, 1851, shows how the incoming order of things impressed the men through whom it was wrought out. The very style of the article illustrates the habit of thought and expression which the rush of news, and the swift energy it exacted, created in the editor, when he was a man of power and sensitiveness.

"Nothing can be more evident to the public, and nothing certainly is more evident to publishers of newspapers, than that there is a great deal more news nowadays than there used to be. . . Publishers of country weeklies used to fish with considerable anxiety in a shallow sea, for matter sufficient to fill their sheets, while dailies only dreamed of an existence in the larger cities. . Now all is changed. The increase of facilities for the transmission of news brought in a new era. The railroad car, the steamboat, and the magnetic telegraph have made neighborhood among widely dissevered states, and the Eastern Continent is but a few days' journey away. These active and almost miraculous agencies have brought the whole civilized world in contact. The editor sits in his sanctum, and his obedient messengers are the lightning and the fire. He knows a fire has raged in London before the wind could waft its smoke to him; the lightning tells him of an explosion in New Orleans before they have counted the dead and wounded; the debates of Congress are in his hands, though hundreds and thousands of miles from the Capitol, before the members who participated in them have eaten their dinner; a speech is

under his eyes before the hurrahs it awakened have died away; and there he sits day after day, as if he were the center of the world, to whom all men and things are accountable, and all actions returnable. These events are chronicled and explained, and then they are given to his messengers, the rushing engines, which carry them to thousands of greedy eyes, waiting to see, in one brief transcript, the record of the world's great struggle the previous day. . . The appetite for news is one of those appetites that grows by what it feeds on. . . The mind accustomed to the gossip of nations cannot content itself with the gossip of families. The tendency of this new state of things has as yet hardly claimed a moment's consideration from the moralist and the philosopher. Nations and individuals now stand immediately responsible to the world's opinion, and the world, interesting itself in the grand events transpiring in its various parts, and among its various parties, has become, and is still becoming, liberalized in feeling; and being called away from its exclusive home-fields has forgotten, in its universal interests, the petty interests, feuds, gossips and strifes of families and neighborhoods. This wonderful extension of the field of vision, this compression of the human race into one great family, must tend to identify its interests, sympathies, and motives. The press is destined, more than any other agency, to melt and mold the jarring and contending nations of the world into that one great brotherhood which through long centuries has been the ideal of the Christian and the philanthropist. Its mission has but just commenced. A few years more and a great thought uttered within sight of the Atlantic will rise with the morrow's sun and shine upon millions of minds within sight of the Pacific. The murmur of Asia's multitudes will be heard at our doors; and, laden with the fruit of all human thought and action, the newspaper will be in every abode, the daily nourishment of every mind."

This was the ideal view of the matter. But meantime the Republican was making its mark especially through a close attention to the home field and its homely details. At this period its especial claim was to report and repre