Godkin took a broader view in 1868, which he forcibly expressed in a letter to the London Daily News. “There is no careful and intelligent observer,” he wrote, “whether he be a friend to democracy or not, who can help admiring the unbroken power with which the popular common sense—that shrewdness, or intelligence, or instinct of self-preservation, I care not what you call it, which so often makes the American farmer a far better politician than nine tenths of the best read European political philosophers—works under all this tumult and confusion of tongues. The newspapers and politicians fret and fume and shout and denounce; but the great mass, the nineteen or twenty millions, work away in the fields and workshops, saying little, thinking much, hardy, earnest, self-reliant, very tolerant, very indulgent, very shrewd, but ready whenever the government needs it, with musket, or purse, or vote, as the case may be, laughing and cheering occasionally at public meetings, but when you meet them individually on the highroad or in their own houses, very cool, then, sensible men, filled with no delusions, carried away by no frenzies, believing firmly in the future greatness and glory of the republic, but holding to no other article of faith as essential to political salvation.”

[p288]
Before continuing the quotation I wish to call attention to the fact that Godkin’s illustration was more effective in 1868 than now: then there was a solemn and vital meaning to the prayers offered up for persons going to sea that they might be preserved from the dangers of the deep. “Every now and then,” he went on to say, “as one watches the political storms in the United States, one is reminded of one’s feelings as one lies in bed on a stormy night in an ocean steamer in a head wind. Each blow of the sea shakes the ship from stem to stern, and every now and then a tremendous one seems to paralyze her. The machinery seems to stop work; there is a dead pause, and you think for a moment the end has come; but the throbbing begins once more, and if you go up on deck and look down in the hold, you see the firemen and engineers at their posts, apparently unconscious of anything but their work, and as sure of getting into port as if there was not a ripple on the water.”

This letter of Godkin’s was written on January 8, 1868, when Congress was engaged in the reconstruction of the South on the basis of negro suffrage, when the quarrel between Congress and President Johnson was acute and his impeachment not two months off. At about this time Godkin set down Evarts’s opinion that “we are witnessing the decline of public morality which usually presages revolution,” and reported that Howells was talking “despondently like everybody else about the condition of morals and manners.”[35] Of like tenor was the opinion of an arch-conservative, George Ticknor, written in 1869, which bears a resemblance to the lamentation of Godkin’s later years. “The civil war of ’61,” wrote Ticknor, “has made a great gulf between what happened before it in our century and what has happened [p289] since, or what is likely to happen hereafter. It does not seem to me as if I were living in the country in which I was born, or in which I received whatever I ever got of political education or principles. Webster seems to have been the last of the Romans.”[36]

In 1868 Godkin was an optimist, having a cogent answer to all gloomy predictions; from 1895 to 1902 he was a pessimist; yet reasons just as strong may be adduced for considering the future of the country secure in the later as were urged in the earlier period. But as Godkin grew older, he became a moral censor, and it is characteristic of censors to exaggerate both the evil of the present and the good of the past. Thus in 1899 he wrote of the years 1857–1860: “The air was full of the real Americanism. The American gospel was on people’s lips and was growing with fervor. Force was worshiped, but it was moral force: it was the force of reason, of humanity, of human equality, of a good example. The abolitionist gospel seemed to be permeating the views of the American people, and overturning and destroying the last remaining traditions of the old-world public morality. It was really what might be called the golden age of America.”[37] These were the days of slavery. James Buchanan was President. The internal policy of the party in power was expressed in the Dred Scott decision and the attempt to force slavery on Kansas; the foreign policy, in the Ostend Manifesto, which declared that if Spain would not sell Cuba, the United States would take it by force. The rule in the civil service was, “to the victors belong the spoils.” And New York City, where Godkin resided, had for its mayor Fernando Wood.

In this somewhat rambling paper I have subjected Godkin [p290] to a severe test by a contrast of his public and private utterances covering many years, not however with the intention of accusing him of inconsistency. Ferrero writes that historians of our day find it easy to expose the contradictions of Cicero, but they forget that probably as much could be said of his contemporaries, if we possessed also their private correspondence. Similarly, it is a pertinent question how many journalists and how many public men would stand as well as Godkin in this matter of consistency if we possessed the same abundant records of their activity?

The more careful the study of Godkin’s utterances, the less will be the irritation felt by men who love and believe in their country. It is evident that he was a born critic, and his private correspondence is full of expressions showing that if he had been conducting a journal in England, his criticism of certain phases of English policy would have been as severe as those which he indulged in weekly at the expense of this country. “How Ireland sits heavy on your soul!” he wrote to James Bryce. “Salisbury was an utterly discredited Foreign Secretary when you brought up Home Rule. Now he is one of the wisest of men. Balfour and Chamberlain have all been lifted into eminence by opposition to Home Rule simply.” To Professor Norton: “Chamberlain is a capital specimen of the rise of an unscrupulous politician.” Again: “The fall of England into the hands of a creature like Chamberlain recalls the capture of Rome by Alaric.” To another friend: “I do not like to talk about the Boer War, it is too painful…. When I do speak of the war my language becomes unfit for publication.” On seeing the Queen and the Prince of Wales driving through the gardens at Windsor, his comment was “Fat, useless royalty;” and in 1897 he wrote from England [p291] to Arthur Sedgwick, “There are many things here which reconcile me to America.”[38]

In truth, much of his criticism of America is only an elaboration of his criticism of democracy. In common with many Europeans born at about the same time, who began their political life as radicals, he shows his keen disappointment that democracy has not regenerated mankind. “There is not a country in the world, living under parliamentary government,” he wrote, “which has not begun to complain of the decline in the quality of its legislators. More and more, it is said, the work of government is falling into the hands of men to whom even small pay is important, and who are suspected of adding to their income by corruption. The withdrawal of the more intelligent class from legislative duties is more and more lamented, and the complaint is somewhat justified by the mass of crude, hasty, incoherent, and unnecessary laws which are poured on the world at every session.”[39]

I have thus far spoken only of the political influence of The Nation, but its literary department was equally important. Associated with Godkin from the beginning was Wendell P. Garrison, who became literary editor of the journal, and, who, Godkin wrote in 1871, “has really toiled for six years with the fidelity of a Christian martyr and upon the pay of an oysterman.”[40] I have often heard the literary criticism of The Nation called destructive like the political, but, it appears to me, with less reason. Books for review were sent to experts in different parts of the country, and the list of contributors included many professors from various colleges. While the editor, I believe, [p292] retained, and sometimes exercised, the right to omit parts of the review and make some additions, yet writers drawn from so many sources must have preserved their own individuality. I have heard it said that The Nation gave you the impression of having been entirely written by one man; but whatever there is more than fanciful in that impression must have arisen from the general agreement between the editor and the contributors. Paul Leicester Ford once told me that, when he wrote a criticism for The Nation, he unconsciously took on The Nation’s style, but he could write in that way for no other journal, nor did he ever fall into it in his books. Garrison was much more tolerant than is sometimes supposed. I know of his sending many books to two men, one of whom differed from him radically on the negro question and the other on socialism.

It is only after hearing much detraction of the literary department of The Nation, and after considerable reflection, that I have arrived at the conviction that it came somewhat near to realizing criticism as defined by Matthew Arnold, thus: “A disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.”[41] I am well aware that it was not always equal, and I remember two harsh reviews which ought not to have been printed; but this simply proves that the editor was human and The Nation was not perfect. I feel safe, however, in saying that if the best critical reviews of The Nation were collected and printed in book form, they would show an aspiration after the standard erected by Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold.

Again I must appeal to my individual experience. The man who lived in the middle West for the twenty-five years between 1865 and 1890 needed the literary department of The Nation more than one who lived in Boston or New York. [p293] Most of the books written in America were by New England, New York, and Philadelphia authors, and in those communities literary criticism was evolved by social contact in clubs and other gatherings. We had nothing of the sort in Cleveland, where a writer of books walking down Euclid Avenue would have been stared at as a somewhat remarkable personage. The literary columns of The Nation were therefore our most important link between our practical life and the literary world. I used to copy into my Index Rerum long extracts from important reviews, in which the writers appeared to have a thorough grasp of their subjects; and these I read and re-read as I would a significant passage in a favorite book. In the days when many of us were profoundly influenced by Herbert Spencer’s “Sociology,” I was somewhat astonished to read one week in The Nation, in a review of Pollock’s “Introduction to the Science of Politics,” these words: “Herbert Spencer’s contributions to political and historical science seem to us mere commonplaces, sometimes false, sometimes true, but in both cases trying to disguise their essential flatness and commonness in a garb of dogmatic formalism.”[42] Such an opinion, evidencing a conflict between two intellectual guides, staggered me, and it was with some curiosity that I looked subsequently, when the Index to Periodicals came out, to see who had the temerity thus to belittle Spencer—the greatest political philosopher, so some of his disciples thought, since Aristotle. I ascertained that the writer of the review was James Bryce, and whatever else might be thought, it could not be denied that the controversy was one between giants. I can, I think, date the beginning of my emancipation from Spencer from that review in 1891.