HE universal chorus of applause which in the United States greeted President Cleveland's Venezuela message, continued for precisely three days. At the end of that brief period, discordant notes were heard, so harsh and so insistent as to put an end to what had seemed to be a perfect political harmony. It was, indeed, Mr. Cleveland's fate never to taste in public office the sweets of popularity for any length of time; and he was now to enter upon the most trying year of all. The praise which he had lately won alarmed the Republican leaders. They had perforce commended the bold front which he had shown to England; yet this sudden popularity seemed likely to upset their plans. Was the President thinking of a third term? Chauncey M. Depew in a published interview suggested this hypothesis, and it created something like a panic among the gentlemen who were asserting that they could elect even a yellow dog in 1896. Therefore, almost immediately, the Republican press began to qualify its praise of Mr. Cleveland and to forget its enthusiasm of a day or two before. The New York Sun, which once again had drifted into the anti-Cleveland ranks, disclosed a new line of criticism in an editorial remark:

Mr.

"If the eccentric statesman and instinctive antagonist of the more vital American sentiments, who now occupies the White House, had dealt with the Venezuelan affair from the beginning in the creditable spirit shown in his message, it is a question whether the situation would not now be satisfactory and without danger of war.

*New York Sun, December 18, 1905.

The Sun's lead was quickly followed by the Tribune, which had at first spoken of the President's "straightforward, manly words," but which now called his diplomacy that of "a self-opinionated tyro."

But it was not the political, so much as the financial aspect of the situation that raised a storm of disapproval, and this, curiously enough, not only in those quarters where the President had hitherto found strong support, but also in a section where he was already hated. The possibility of a war with England had frightened Wall Street. On the day after the message, stocks dropped several points, and the market was decidedly weaker at the close. On the 19th, when the full gravity of the situation had become known, there was something very like a panic. The soundest securities declined in value. It was said that European holders of American stocks and bonds were preparing to sell them in large blocks. According to an estimate generally accepted at the time, the depreciation in values, consequent upon the prospect of war, amounted to at least $400,000,000. It was then that Wall Street turned on Mr. Cleveland. Hitherto, the bankers and brokers and other financiers had lauded him for having, as they said, preserved the national credit. and saved the country from repudiation. But now that stocks were down, these same men cursed his very name. Whether his policy was brave and honourable or the reverse, was nothing to them. "Margins" had been wiped out, money had been lost. That was all they cared about. And so it came to pass that the President was wounded in the house of his friends. It was now that he lost for a while the support of one who had been among the most devoted, the most consistent and the most

able of all his advocates in the press,Mr. Edward Lawrence Godkin, the editor of the New York Evening Post.

Mr. Godkin at that time divided with Mr. Dana the honour of pre-eminence in American journalism. No two men could have been more utterly unlike in temperament, in training, or in character. Mr. Godkin was an Anglo-Irishman by birth, and as a young man he had been the correspondent of the London Daily News during the Crimean War. In the East he had made the acquaintance of men of great distinction in many fields of effort, from whom, no less than from his reading, he acquired an invaluable fund of knowledge relating to politics, diplomacy, economics, history and, incidentally, human nature. During the American Civil War he acted in the dual capacity of correspondent for the Daily News and for the New York Times, thus establishing a definite connection with American journalism. In 1865 he was made editor of the Nation, and in 1881 he became one of the two editors of the Evening Post, his colleague being Mr. Horace White.

Mr. Godkin's comprehensive knowledge of the great world, his cosmopolitanism, and his personal associations gave him a distinct advantage over those American editors who became famous in spite of their early disadvantages. Such men as Weed and Raymond and Greeley were possessed of natural force, but they lacked breadth of view and liberality of thought. They were infinitely keen at detecting the drift of each cross-current of popular opinion; but they were deficient in the qualities which would have enabled them to guide that drift and to mould and shape opinion for wise and worthy ends. Mr. Godkin's editorial ideals were entirely at variance with those of every other great American editor. He did not set himself directly to appeal to the masses of his adopted countrymen. He never wrote down to the intellectual level of the man in the street. His appeal was rather to men of intelligence and cultivation-men who were really representative of the best elements. in American life professional men, scholars, authors, lawyers, clergymen, great merchants, experts in their own

subjects and for these he wrote in a style that was wonderfully effective. His leading articles presupposed in their readers not merely natural intelligence but education. They were full of allusions of the kind that are heard in the familiar intercourse of men of culture. Yet nothing could have been further removed from pedantry or pose. The manner was ease and simplicity itself. The sentences were short and to the point; the phrasing was crisp and neat and oftentimes colloquial. The whole tone was that of an accomplished gentleman, conversing with a set of intimates at his club. And Mr. Godkin had also a delightful wit at his command,—an appreciation of the comic which made his persiflage delicious and which also tipped his delicate irony with destructiveness. This last quality his irony was a weapon that he used with consummate skill. Its touch was light; yet it could make the apparently invulnerable argument of an adversary shrivel like a leaf. Anything more intensely exasperating than some of his ironic strokes cannot well be imagined; and he was the only one of Dana's editorial contemporaries who could rouse that seasoned veteran to serious wrath.

Mr. Godkin, unlike Dana, had a high regard for principle; and his championship of any cause was as conscientious as it was courageous. Many, indeed, were the causes for which he seemed at times to fight almost alone, yet of which at last he lived to see the triumph. To that triumph his steady hammering, in season and out of season, very powerfully contributed. It is not too much to say that nearly all the most important questions of American political history from 1881 to 1896 got their first public hearing largely through the influence of Mr. Godkin. They were, of course, bound to arise and to clamour for solution; but it was Mr. Godkin's clear prevision which perceived their imminence, as it was his vigorous pen that won for them attention. The reform of the civil service, the introduction of the Australian ballot, the enactment of rigorous election laws, the revision of the tariff, the divorce of municipal government from partisan politics, and the establishment of a stable mone

tary system-all these issues were fairly forced upon the public mind through Mr. Godkin's influence.

And as the whole spirit of his work was different from Dana's, so was his reward a different one. Dana must still perhaps remain in popular remembrance the greatest of all American editors. He was read by the most people, his personality was the best known, he amused and entertained and furnished an infinite number of "quotable bits," and passages for comment. But he exercised no lasting influence, for he was utterly devoid of any real beliefs. His admirations were Isham admirations. His enthusiasms were sham enthusiasms. He was sincere only in his hatreds; and the spectacle of an old man shrieking forth an expression of his hatreds was in the end more repellent than convincing. Mr. Godkin, on the other hand, was never very widely known. Yet through his selected clientèle of readers he exercised a power of persuasion beyond that of any other publicist in the United States. Each of those whom he convinced became a propagandist and an intellectual leavener of the community where he lived. And so, if Mr. Godkin himself was never famous with the sort of fame that Greeley and that Dana won, it may be said of him, as Mr. Howells once most aptly wrote of a greater man than Mr. Godkin: "What he had taught had become part of the life of his generation, and was so far alienated from any consciousness of him in those whose conduct he had largely shaped."

As might have been expected, a personality so marked as that of Mr. Godkin possessed the defects inseparable from its qualities. In declaring his opinions, he was wont to adopt the tone and manner of the superior person, and to assume an air of absolute infallibility such as few are quite prepared to recognise as attainable in this imperfect world. A lack of fairness was another mental characteristic of the man. Editorially he would seldom or never admit that he had erred, even when the proof of error was incontestable. Again, his censure was at times so bitter and so unsparing as to create a certain sympathy with those who suffered from it. Indeed, among his vic

tims were many who had once been Mr. Godkin's friends and fellow-workers, but who had had the reprehensible temerity to differ with him as to public questions. On such as these he always poured the choicest vials of his wrath, and showed himself intolerant beyond belief. They had, in his eyes, committed the unpardonable sin. Having once seen the light of the pure Godkinian revelation, they had sinned against it. Hence it was that the most persistent readers of the Evening Post were the very men who spoke of it with gibes. They read it and were influenced by it, yet at the same time they felt themselves continually irritated by its tone. One of these gentlemen-a very eminent New Yorker who had sometimes felt the touch of Mr. Godkin's chastening rod-is said to have spoken of the Post as "that pessimistic, malignant and malevolent sheet-which no good citizen ever goes to bed without reading!" reading!" And to the same gentleman was ascribed another and very widely quoted epigram, uttered in answer to a friend who was deploring the general demoralisation of New York. "But what can you expect," broke in his hearer, "of a city with two such leading newspapers -the Sun in the morning making vice attractive, and the Post in the evening making virtue odious!"

Perhaps the most marked of Mr. Godkin's mental attributes was his inability to appreciate the power of sentiment and the force of human passion. For these things, like one of his favourite philosophers, J. S. Mill, he seemed unable to make any allowance whatsoever; but he took a cold-blooded, commercial view of almost every public question. Had he remained in England, he would have been a Little Englander of the straitest sect, improving even upon Mill and Cobden and the prophets of the Manchester School. As an American editor he applied the same standards to American affairs. In his eyes, no war could be justifiable, because it cost money. No threat of war was ever to be made, because it depreciated. the value of stocks and bonds. National honour was a thing to be written of in derisive quotation marks, and to be regarded only as a word belonging to the vocabulary of the political swashbuckler.

With such beliefs it may be readily conIceived that Mr. Godkin read the President's Venezuela message with a mixture of horror and disgust-horror because it might mean actual fighting, and disgust because it seemed to evince so much ingratitude to Mr. Godkin. Ever since the name of Cleveland had been heard in national politics, the Evening Post had been his thick and thin supporter. It had defended him against the scandalmongers in 1884; it had praised the achievements of his first administration; it had urged persistently his second candidacy; it had made his financial policy its own. And now he had dared to break away from all the Cobdenite-Godkinian traditions, and to show himself as pugnacious in an international dispute as though he had been a Cass, a Marcy or a Blaine !

Small wonder, then, that the Evening Post declared as soon as the message reached its office, that "the President's fulmination has no moral support whatever." On the 19th, it pronounced his action "criminally rash and insensate."

"The national finances, already in a perilous condition, will be shaken as they have not been since the Civil War. Mr. Cleveland has frustrated his own wise attempts to adjust them on a sound basis."

"The President's message is a standing and very insulting threat to a first-class power."

The Post quoted against the President his own dictum, that "patriotism is no substitute for a sound currency." It spoke of his "Jingo insanity;" it declared his policy to be marked by "insolence, abusiveness and brutality." Every one who favoured it came in for a share of Mr. Godkin's wrath; and he even accused a well-known administration Senator of appearing at a public banquet in a state of intoxication, and delivering a speech which was "hiccoughed out to a deriding, hooting and insulting audience," though what this had to do with the Venezuelan question it would have been hard for even Mr. Godkin to explain.

The Evening Post's especial following took up the same parable. Clergymen preached against the righteousness of war. Some college professors gave their verdict to the effect that

the President's view of the Monroe Doctrine was all wrong. A convocation of Baptist missionaries passed resolutions declaring that the United States might better go to war with Turkey on behalf of the Armenians than with Great Britain on behalf of the Venezuelans. There was, in fact, in the United States, something of the same divergence of opinion as existed in Great Britain. But the country as a whole soon ceased to think of this particular issue, because of the immediate revival of an older one.

The uneasiness of Wall Street was speedily reflected in a new drain on the gold fund in the Treasury. The Morgan-Belmont syndicate had carried out its promise; and for nine months the reserve had been efficiently protected. But in November there was felt a slow but steady outflow, which had brought the fund to less than $80,000,000; and in December the hoarding of gold once more began. The menace of war led bankers to ship gold to Europe. Only three days after his Venezuela message, and on the eve of the usual adjournment for the Christmas holidays, the President sent a brief communication to Congress urging it to take some action for the betterment of financial conditions. As this advice was utterly ignored, Secretary Carlisle was directed to issue (January 6, 1896) a circular asking for subscriptions to a new loan of $100,000,000.* This was the fourth and last of the bond issues made by Mr. Cleveland in order to protect the gold reserve, as it was also the largest. Unlike the two preceding ones, this loan was offered for popular subscription. Bonds of a denomination as low as fifty dollars were engraved, so that the most modest investor might have an opportunity to bid; and an entire month was to elapse before the sealed proposals were opened. In deciding to offer the loan in this public way rather than once more to make a bargain with a syndicate, the President was undoubtedly influenced by the scathing criticism which had been visited upon him. would never admit this, either then or afterwards; yet one cannot think other

He

*Four-per cent. coin bonds to run for thirty

years.

wise.

*

Moreover, Congress had taken the matter up with serious intention. A House bill provided that no bond sales should be made thereafter save by popular subscription. Senator Elkins had offered a resolution declaring that bonds should not be sold at all by private contract. On the whole, the President must have felt the sting of an almost universal censure; and so he now arranged a loan before the Treasury was actually in distress, and he went directly to the people rather than to Wall Street. As it turned out, there were 4635 bidders for the bonds, and the loan was oversubscribed by $400,000,000. It was a triumph for the advocates of the open sales. To be sure, of the bids received, only 828 were accepted; and in the allotment of the bonds, Messrs. J. P. Morgan and Company, who had offered to take the entire issue, received some $62,000,000, while the other bidders received $38,000,000. But it is to be noted that the lowest bid which the Treasury now considered was at the rate of 110 as against the 104 paid by the Morgan-Belmont syndicate in the preceding February. This fact alone would seem to be a sufficient condemnation of the syndicate transaction, though Mr. Cleveland never would admit the fact.†

Reviewing the whole series of bond. issues after the lapse of many years, and regarding all the circumstances connected with them, there appears not to be the slightest reason for impugning the good faith, the integrity, or the patriotism of President Cleveland. All through those trying times, he acted as he believed the highest interests of his country bade him. act. But in the matter of the bond-contract with the Morgan-Belmont syndicate, there can be little doubt that he was guilty of a serious mistake-not_in the arrangement which necessity drove. him into making, but because he delayed so long as to create that unfortunate necessity. That he learned the lesson of his error was shown by his management of the fourth and last bond issue. During his final year of office, the Treasury

suffered no more from speculative raids upon it. Wall Street had found that the siphon-process could be no longer made a source of private gain.

But the fact that the President had again sold bonds to keep the gold reserve intact fanned the already fierce resentment of the silver party into a more furious flame. The Western silver men cared nothing for the effect of the Venezuela message upon Wall Street. If it caused a panic there, so much the better. If stock gamblers had been ruined by it, well and good. If securities had dropped four hundred millions in value, this was a cause for grim rejoicing. The prospect of a war with England was very popular all through the West, not upon patriotic grounds alone, but as likely to bring an era of easy money and good times. A writer in the Oregonian, published in Portland, Oregon, undoubtedly expressed a widely prevalent feeling when he declared that the people of his State and many other Americans wished a war because

"they all know that the wealth of the world has got into the hands of a few, and that there is no relief for the masses. Business is at a standstill and will remain so until something happens. . . . We are at the mercy of England, so far as our finances go, and this [war] is our only way out."

Such was the prevailing sentiment in the Western States, so far as the Venezuelan incident was immediately concerned. But the new gold loan, this vast addition to the public debt for the sole purpose of "insulting silver," was the last straw upon the back of the by no means patient Populists. By this time, men had formed the habit of speaking of gold and silver as though the two metals were possessed of human attributes. They were not only animified but personified; and both vices and virtues were ascribed to them. A thousand hoarse-throated orators depicted the infamy of gold and the rectitude of silver. Gold was the coward metal which basely sneaked out of the country when times were troublous. It was the accomplice of money-sharks and usurers, the enemy of labour; the traitorous propagator of poverty and want. Silver, on the other hand, was brave and hon