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Updated: June 2, 2025
With men so gifted, and chosen from all parts of the country, uniformly destructive criticism could not have prevailed. Among them were optimists as well as pessimists, and men as independent in thought as was Godkin himself.
Foremost among newspapers was the New York Tribune; foremost among editors was Horace Greeley. Of Greeley in his best days Godkin wrote: "He has an enthusiasm which never flags, and a faith in principles which nothing can shake, and an English style which, for vigor, terseness, clearness, and simplicity, has never been surpassed, except perhaps by Cobbett."
If instead of crossing the Mississippi bottoms and ascribing to slavery the hardships he observed, Godkin had been crossing the Nevada desert that year and had come upon, as many others did, a train of emigrants with its oxen dead, its women and children perishing of thirst, and its men with despairing eyes turned still toward the gold-fields of California, would he have inveighed against freedom as the cause?
The man who penned those words should remember the choice of alternatives ever present to the mind of an Irishman, however unjustly suspected or accused the probability of imprisonment or hanging, of being sent to the workhouse or transported to the "American plantations." The Irishman must have changed very materially and very rapidly since Mr. Godkin wrote.
Godkin "Problems of Modern Democracy." 221-224. By the continued repetition of truth and the persevering refutation of falsehood we will help to create around us, in our limited sphere of action, a sane Public Opinion. But it is above all by the radiance of our moral life that truth, particularly religious truth, will spread.
A number of western Liberals such as A. Scott Sloan in Wisconsin and Ignatius Donnelly in Minnesota championed the farmers' cause, it is true, and in some States there was a fusion of party organizations; but men like Schurz and Trumbull held aloof from these radical movements, while Easterners like Godkin of the Nation met them with ridicule and invective.
An incident related by Godkin himself shows that at least one distinguished gentleman did not enjoy sitting at meat with Greeley. During the spring of 1864 Godkin met Greeley at breakfast at the house of Mr. John A. C. Gray.
And New York City, where Godkin resided, had for its mayor Fernando Wood. In this somewhat rambling paper I have subjected Godkin 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.
In the numbers of people whom he influenced, Greeley had the advantage over Godkin. In February, 1855, the circulation of the Tribune was 172,000, and its own estimate of its readers half a million, which was certainly not excessive.
E.L. Godkin, an American writer, whose judgments are entitled to respect, has expressed much the same opinion; "the delegate theory," he says, "has been gaining ground in England, and in America has almost completely succeeded in asserting its sway, so that we have seen many cases in which members of Congress have openly declared their dissent from the measures for which they voted in obedience to their constituents."
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