approved--regardless always of the disapproval of others. Not once did
he palter with his convictions or juggle with his self-respect for the
sake of pelf or applause. His human horizon was contracted, to be sure.
It could hardly be otherwise in one so young. His world was his country,
and patriotism imposed limits upon his affections. "Our country, our
whole country, and nothing but our country," was the ardent motto of the
_Free Press_. The love of family comes, in the order of growth, before
the love of country; and the love of country precedes the love of all
mankind. "First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear,"
is the great law of love in the soul as of corn in the soil. Besides
this contraction of the affections, there was also manifest in his first
journalistic venture a deficiency in the organ of vision, a failure to
see into things and their relations. What he saw he reported faithfully,
suppressing nothing, adding nothing. But the objects which passed across
the disk of his editoral intelligence were confined almost entirely to
the surface of things, to the superficies of national life. He had not
the ken at twenty to penetrate beneath the happenings of current
politics. Of the existence of slavery as a supreme reality, we do not
think that he then had the faintest suspicion. No shadow of its
tremendous influence as a political power seemed to have arrested for a
brief instant his attention. He could copy into his paper this atrocious
sentiment which Edward Everett delivered in Congress, without the
slightest comment or allusion. "Sir, I am no soldier. My habits and
education are very unmilitary, but there is no cause in which I would
sooner buckle a knapsack on my back, and put a musket on my shoulder
than that of putting down a servile insurrection at the South." The
reason is plain enough. Slavery was a _terra incognito_ to him then, a
book of which he had not learned the ABC. Mr. Everett's language made no
impression on him, because he had not the key to interpret its
significance. What he saw, that he set down for his readers, without