the London Daily News in 1868, that made possible all his achievements as well as the great influence that he acquired. Later in life he met with disappointments—intellectual disappointments in his case; for he was too sincere in his nature to seek political office,—and those intellectual disappointments acted on him as disappointments of other varieties acted on other great journalists—they soured him and made him appear a man without faith and without belief.
The good that he did was not accomplished when he was bereft of the enthusiasm that moves men, but rather when he felt as he did in 1868, shortly after the Civil War; incidentally the country was then facing far more serious conditions than it faced when Godkin was so doleful.
"There is no careful and intelligent observer," he wrote, "whether he be a friend to democracy or not, who can help admiring the unbroken power with which the popular common sense—that shrewdness, or intelligence, or instinct of self-preservation, I care not what you call it, which so often makes the American farmer a better politician than nine-tenths of the best read European philosophers—works under all this tumult and confusion of tongues. The newspapers and politicians fret and fume and shout and denounce; but the great mass, the nineteen or twenty millions, work away in the fields and workshops, saying little, thinking much, hardy, earnest, self-reliant, very tolerant, very indulgent, very shrewd, but ready whenever the government needs it, with musket, or purse or vote, as the case may be, laughing and cheering occasionally at public meetings, but when you meet them individually on the highroad or in their own houses, very cool, then, sensible men, filled with no delusions, carried away by no frenzies, believing firmly in the future
