of the offer of the French mission.  He was mistaken in supposing that this paper had any considerable power to change votes; which was shown by the result of the Presidential election in the city of New York, where General McClellan had the great majority of thirty-seven thousand.  Influence over opinion no paper can have which has itself no opinion, and cares for none.  It is not as a vehicle of opinion that the Herald has importance, but solely as a vehicle of news.  It is for its excellence, real or supposed, in this particular, that eighty thousand people buy it every morning.  Mr. Lincoln committed, as we cannot help thinking, a most egregious error and fault in his purchase of the editor of this paper, though he is in some degree excused by the fact that several leading Republicans, who were in a position to know better, advised or sanctioned the bargain, and leading journalists agreed not to censure it.  Mr. Lincoln could not be expected to draw the distinction, between the journalist and the writer of editorials.  He perceived the strength of this carrier-pigeon’s pinions, but did not note the trivial character of the message tied to its leg.  Thirty or forty war correspondents in the field, a circulation larger than any of its rivals, an advertising patronage equalled only by that of the London Times, the popularity of the paper in the army, the frequent utility of its maps and other elucidations,—­these things imposed upon his mind; and his wife could tell him from personal observation, that the proprietor of this paper lived in a style of the most profuse magnificence,—­maintaining costly establishments in town and country, horses, and yachts, to say nothing of that most expensive appendage to a reigning house, an heir apparent.

Our friends in the English press tell us, that the Herald was one of the principal obstacles in their attempts to guide English opinions aright during the late struggle.  Young men in the press would point to its editorials and say: 

“This is the principal newspaper in the Northern States; this is the Times of America; can a people be other than contemptible who prefer such a newspaper as this to journals so respectable and so excellent as the Times and Tribune, published in the same city?” “As to (American) journalism,”

says Professor Goldwin Smith, “the New York Herald is always kept before our eyes.”  That is to say, the editorial articles in the Herald; not that variety and fulness of intelligence which often compelled men who hated it most to get up at the dawn of day to buy it.  A paper which can detach two or three men, after a battle, to collect the names of the killed and wounded, with orders to do only that, cannot lack purchasers in war time.  Napoleon assures us that the whole art of war consists in having the greatest force at the point of contact.  This rule applies to the art of journalism; the editor of the Herald knew it, and had the means to put it in practice.