"Mr. Godkin was not only inaccessible to the lures of wealth—the same may happily be said of many of his craft-brethren—he was just as little accessible to the fear of public displeasure. Nothing more incensed him than to see a statesman or an editor with ' his ear to the ground' (to use an American phrase), seeking to catch the sound of the coming crowd. To him, the less popular a view was, so much the more did it need to be well weighed, and if approved, to be strenuously and incessantly preached. Democracies will always have demagogues ready to feed their vanity and stir their passions and exaggerate the feeling of the moment. What they need is men who will swim against the stream, will tell them their faults, will urge an argument all the more forcibly because it is unwelcome. Such a one was Edwin Godkin. Since the death of Abraham Lincoln, America has been jgenerally more influenced by her writers, preachers, and thinkers than by her statesmen. In the list of those who have during the past forty years influenced her for good and helped by their pens to make history, a list illustrated by such names as those of R. W. Emerson and Phillips Brooks and James Russell Lowell, his name will find its place and receive its well-earned meed of honor."[1]
By no possible conception could his life be called a failure. The pessimism of his later years was not due to any fault of his adopted country, but to his failure to remain youthful in spirit; a failure due, in turn, to the fact that he had, as De Quincey says of Kant, "no faith, no self-distrust, no humility, no child-like docility." Men to be right, had to agree with him.
That spirit was against the very idea of government by public opinion; it was bound to breed the belief that,
- ↑ Contemporary Biography, 380, 381.
