figure, for he paved the way for things that were revolutionary in their day, though commonplace now. Furthermore, it came at a time when, on account of inventions and the great opening up of material opportunities, the introduction of the railroads, etc., there was every opportunity for his fertile genius.
It is easy enough now to see this and to appreciate how much he was indebted to the journalists and journalism that had come before him, and to understand that, if he had not done what he did, some one else would have worked out about the same time, and along nearly the same lines, the growing problems of journalism. But in his own time he was considered a daring innovator—and in some ways he was; though from much of what has been written about him one might assume that there was no journalism before him. It is true that his personal eccentricities gave his enterprise an individual flavor that caused the conservative element of society to view him with horror, though the same conservative element came later to regard the New York Herald as its special organ, and to look to it for the proper reports of its "social" doings.
It was the perusal of an edition of Franklin's autobiography, published in Scotland in 1817, that led young Bennett to come to America. In May, 1819, being then about twenty years of age, he landed in Halifax without a friend in the western continent and with less than twenty-five dollars in his purse.[1]
Between the day of that landing and the starting of the New York Herald sixteen years elapsed, during which time he worked in many parts of the country and obtained at first hand an accurate understanding of American politics. He made his way to Boston and there saw, for the
- ↑ Parton, Famous Americans, 270.
