Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/416

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HISTORY OF JOURNALISM

recognize me as belonging to your household. If a new office had not since been created on purpose to give its valuable patronage to H. J. Raymond, and enable St. John to show forth his Times as the organ of the Whig state administration, I should have been still more grateful.

"In 1848 your star again rose, and my warmest hopes were realized in your election to the Senate. I was no longer needy, and had no more claim than desire to be recognized by General Taylor. I think I had some claim to forbearance from you. What I received thereupon was a most humiliating lecture in the shape of a decision in the libel case of Redfield and Pringle, and an obligation to publish it in my own and the other journal of our supposed firm. I thought, and still think, this lecture needlessly cruel and mortifying. The plaintiffs, after using my columns to the extent of their needs or desires, stopped writing, and called on me for the name of their assailant. I proffered it to them—a thoroughly responsible name. They refused to accept it unless it should prove to be one of the four or five first men in Batavia—when they had known from the first who it was, and that it was neither of them. They would not accept that which they had demanded; they sued me, instead, for money, and money you were at liberty to give them to your heart's content—I do not think you were at liberty to humiliate me in the eyes of my own and your public as you did. I think you exalted your own judicial sternness and fearlessness unduly at my expense. I think you had a better occasion for the display of these qualities when Webb threw himself untimely upon you for a pardon which he had done all a man could do to demerit. (His paper is paying you for it now.)

"I have publicly set forth my view of yours and our duty with respect to fusion, Nebraska, and party designations. I will not repeat any of that. I have referred also to Weed's reading me out of the Whig Party—my crime being, in this as in some other things, that of doing to-day what more politic persons will not be ready to do till to-morrow.

"Let me speak of the late canvass. I was once sent to Congress for ninety days merely to enable Jim Brooks to secure a seat therein for four years. I think I never hinted to any human being that I would have liked to be put forward