other hand, diligently sought testimony of that nature.  The Times, also, being fully committed to a certain theory of reconstruction, naturally gave prominence to every fact which supported that theory, and was inclined to suppress information of the opposite tendency.  The consequence was, that an inhabitant of the city of New York who simply desired to know the truth was compelled to keep an eye upon four or five papers, lest something material should escape him.  This is pitiful.  This is utterly beneath the journalism of 1866.  The final pre-eminent newspaper of America will soar far above such needless limitations as these, and present the truth in all its aspects, regardless of its effects upon theories, parties, factions, and Presidential campaigns.

Presidential campaigns,—­that is the real secret.  The editors of most of these papers have selected their candidate for 1868; and, having done that, can no more help conducting their journals with a view to the success of that candidate, than the needle of a compass can help pointing awry when there is a magnet hidden in the binnacle.  Here, again, we have no right to censure or complain.  Yet we cannot help marvelling at the hallucination which can induce able men to prefer the brief and illusory honors of political station to the substantial and lasting power within the grasp of the successful journalist.  He, if any one,—­he more than any one else,—­is the master in a free country.  Have we not seen almost every man who has held or run for the Presidency during the last ten or fifteen years paying assiduous and servile court, directly or indirectly, or both, to the editor of the Herald?  If it were proper to relate to the public what is known on this subject to a few individuals, the public would be exceedingly astonished.  And yet this reality of power an editor is ready to jeopard for the sake of gratifying his family by exposing them in Paris!  Jeopard, do we say?  He has done more:  he has thrown it away.  He has a magnet in his binnacle.  He has, for the time, sacrificed what it cost him thirty years of labor and audacity to gain.  Strange weakness of human nature!

The daily press of the United States has prodigiously improved in every respect during the last twenty years.  To the best of our recollection, the description given of it, twenty-three years ago, by Charles Dickens, in his American Notes, was not much exaggerated; although that great author did exaggerate its effects upon the morals of the country.  His own amusing account of the rival editors in Pickwick might have instructed him on this latter point.  It does not appear that the people of Eatanswill were seriously injured by the fierce language employed in “that false and scurrilous print, the Independent,” and in “that vile and slanderous calumniator, the Gazette.”  Mr. Dickens, however, was too little conversant with our politics to take the atrocious language formerly so common in our newspapers “in a Pickwickian sense”; and we freely confess that in the alarming picture which he drew of our press there was only too much truth.