In my conversion from a belief in a protective tariff to the advocacy of one for revenue only, I recognize an obligation to Godkin, but his was only one of many influences. I owe The Nation much for its accurate knowledge of foreign affairs, especially of English politics, in which its readers were enlightened by one of the most capable of living men, Albert V. Dicey. I am indebted to it for sound ideas on municipal government, and for its advocacy of many minor measures, such for instance as the International Copyright Bill. I owe it something for its later attitude on Reconstruction, and its condemnation of the negro carpet-bag governments in the South. In a word, The Nation was on the side of civilization and good political morals.

Confessing thus my great political indebtedness to Godkin, it is with some reluctance that I present a certain phase of his thought which was regretted by many of his best friends, and which undoubtedly limited his influence in the later years of his life. A knowledge of this shortcoming is, however, essential to a thorough comprehension of the man. It is frequently said that Godkin rarely, if ever, made a retraction or a rectification of personal charges shown to be incorrect. A thorough search of The Nation’s columns would be necessary fully to substantiate this statement, but my own impression, covering as it does thirty-three years’ reading of the paper under Godkin’s control, inclines me to believe in its truth, as I do not remember an instance of the kind.

A grave fault of omission occurs to me as showing a regrettable bias in a leader of intelligent opinion. On January 5, 1897, General Francis A. Walker died. He had served with [p283] credit as an officer during our Civil War, and in two thoughtful books had made a valuable contribution to its military history. He was superintendent of the United States Census of 1870, and did work that statisticians and historians refer to with gratitude and praise. For sixteen years he served with honor the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as its president. He was a celebrated political economist, his books being (I think) as well known in England as in this country. Yale, Amherst, Harvard, Columbia, St. Andrews, and Dublin conferred upon him the degree of LL.D. Withal he served his city with public spirit. Trinity Church, “crowded and silent” in celebrating its last service over the dead body of Walker, witnessed one of the three most impressive funerals which Boston has seen for at least sixteen years—a funeral conspicuous for the attendance of a large number of delegates from colleges and learned societies.

Walker was distinctly of the intellectual élite of the country. But The Nation made not the slightest reference to his death. In the issue of January 7, appearing two days later, I looked for an allusion in “The Week,” and subsequently for one of those remarkable and discriminating eulogies, which in smaller type follow the editorials, and for which The Nation is justly celebrated; but there was not one word. You might search the 1897 volume of The Nation and, but for a brief reference in the April “Notes” to Walker’s annual report posthumously published, you would not learn that a great intellectual leader had passed away. I wrote to a valued contributor of The Nation, a friend of Walker, of Godkin, and of Wendell P. Garrison (the literary editor), inquiring if he knew the reason for the omission, and in answer he could only tell me that his amazement had been as great as mine. He at first looked eagerly, and, when [p284] the last number came in which a eulogy could possibly appear, he turned over the pages of The Nation with sorrowful regret, hardly believing his eyes that the article he sought was not there.

Now I suspect that the reason of this extraordinary omission was due to the irreconcilable opinions of Walker and Godkin on a question of finance. It was a period when the contest between the advocates of a single gold standard and the bimetallists raged fiercely, and the contest had not been fully settled by the election of McKinley in 1896. Godkin was emphatically for gold, Walker equally emphatic for a double standard. And they clashed. It is a notable example of the peculiarity of Godkin, to allow at the portal of death the one point of political policy on which he and Walker disagreed to overweigh the nine points in which they were at one.

Most readers of The Nation noticed distinctly that, from 1895 on, its tone became more pessimistic and its criticism was marked by greater acerbity. Mr. Rollo Ogden in his biography shows that Godkin’s feeling of disappointment over the progress of the democratic experiment in America, and his hopelessness of our future, began at an earlier date.

During his first years in the United States, he had no desire to return to his mother country. When the financial fortune of The Nation was doubtful, he wrote to Norton that he should not go back to England except as a “last extremity. It would be going back into an atmosphere that I detest, and a social system that I have hated since I was fourteen years old.”[24] In 1889, after an absence of twenty-seven years, he went to England. The best intellectual society of London and Oxford opened its doors to him and [p285] he fell under its charm as would any American who was the recipient of marked attentions from people of such distinction. He began to draw contrasts which were not favorable to his adopted country. “I took a walk along the wonderful Thames embankment,” he wrote, “a splendid work, and I sighed to think how impossible it would be to get such a thing done in New York. The differences in government and political manners are in fact awful, and for me very depressing. Henry James [with whom he stopped in London] and I talk over them sometimes ‘des larmes dans la voix.’” In 1894, however, Godkin wrote in the Forum: “There is probably no government in the world to-day as stable as that of the United States. The chief advantage of democratic government is, in a country like this, the enormous force it can command in an emergency.”[25] But next year his pessimism is clearly apparent. On January 12, 1895, he wrote to Norton: “You see I am not sanguine about the future of democracy. I think we shall have a long period of decline like that which followed (?) the fall of the Roman Empire, and then a recrudescence under some other form of society.”[26]

A number of things had combined to affect him profoundly. An admirer of Grover Cleveland and three times a warm supporter of his candidacy for the Presidency, he saw with regret the loss of his hold on his party, which was drifting into the hands of the advocates of free silver. Then in December, 1895, Godkin lost faith in his idol. “I was thunderstruck by Cleveland’s message” on the Venezuela question, he wrote to Norton. His submission to the Jingoes “is a terrible shock.”[27] Later, in a calm review of passing events, he called the message a “sudden declaration of [p286] war without notice against Great Britain.”[28] The danger of such a proceeding he had pointed out to Norton: Our “immense democracy, mostly ignorant … is constantly on the brink of some frightful catastrophe like that which overtook France in 1870.”[29] In 1896 he was deeply distressed at the country having to choose for President between the arch-protectionist McKinley and the free-silver advocate Bryan, for he had spent a good part of his life combating a protective tariff and advocating sound money. Though the Evening Post contributed powerfully to the election of McKinley, from the fact that its catechism, teaching financial truths in a popular form, was distributed throughout the West in immense quantities by the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Godkin himself refused to vote for McKinley and put in his ballot for Palmer, the gold Democrat.[30]

The Spanish-American war seems to have destroyed any lingering hope that he had left for the future of American democracy. He spoke of it as “a perfectly avoidable war forced on by a band of unscrupulous politicians” who had behind them “a roaring mob.”[31] The taking of the Philippines and the subsequent war in these islands confirmed him in his despair. In a private letter written from Paris, he said, “American ideals were the intellectual food of my youth, and to see America converted into a senseless, Old-World conqueror, embitters my age.”[32] To another he wrote that his former “high and fond ideals about America were now all shattered.”[33] “Sometimes he seemed to feel,” said his intimate friend, James Bryce, “as though he had labored in vain for forty years.”[34]

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Such regrets expressed by an honest and sincere man with a high ideal must command our respectful attention. Though due in part to old age and enfeebled health, they are still more attributable to his disappointment that the country had not developed in the way that he had marked out for her. For with men of Godkin’s positive convictions, there is only one way to salvation. Sometimes such men are true prophets; at other times, while they see clearly certain aspects of a case, their narrowness of vision prevents them from taking in the whole range of possibilities, especially when the enthusiasm of manhood is gone.