young men avoided politics, considering themselves superior to those who took an interest in their country's welfare.
His influence was as potent in the West as in the East. Many were the strong and able men who owed to him their interest and activity in favor of civil service reforms, their ideas on "sound "money, their belief in free trade, and their interest in a clean city government. These were his main teachings, and he taught them with a vigor and distinction of expression that led James Bryce to say that the Nation was not only the best publication of its kind in America, but the best in the world. On the other hand it was said that he never "made a retraction or rectification of personal charges shown to be incorrect."[1] When General Francis A. Walker died in 1897, Godkin refused even to notice his funeral in the Nation, although Walker was one of the distinguished economists of the country, because the two had taken opposite sides on the gold question in 1896.
In the latter part of his life the inevitable, or rather what might be expected of a disciple of Bentham, happened. He became a thorough pessimist and regarded the democratic experiment in America as a hopeless failure. He returned to England, despairing entirely of America, and, writing to Charles Eliot Norton, said:
"But the situation to me seems this: An immense democracy, mostly ignorant, and completely secluded from foreign influences, and without any knowledge of other states of society, with great contempt for history and experience, finds itself in possession of enormous power and is eager to use it in brutal fashion against any one who comes along, without knowing how to do it, and is therefore constantly on the brink of some frightful catastrophe
- ↑ Rhodes, 282.
