with the progress of science new arts emerge and new occupations
and trades are created, so with the progress of society professions
previously unknown arise, evolve new types of intellectual excellence,
and supply a new theatre for the display of peculiar and exceptional
gifts. Such a profession, such a type, and the type which is perhaps
most specially characteristic of our times, is that of the Editor. It
scarcely existed before the French Revolution, and is, as now fully
developed, a product of the last eighty years. Various are its forms.
There is the Business Editor, who runs his newspaper as a great
commercial undertaking, and may neither care for politics nor attach
himself to any political party. America still recollects the familiar
example set by James Gordon Bennett, the founder of the _New York
Herald_. There is the Selective Editor, who may never pen a line, but
shows his skill in gathering an able staff round him, and in allotting
to each of them the work he can do best. Such an one was John Douglas
Cook, a man of slender cultivation and few intellectual interests,
but still remembered in England by those who forty years ago knew the
staff of the _Saturday Review_, then in its brilliant prime, as
possessed of an extraordinary instinct for the topics which caught the
public taste, and for the persons capable of handling those topics.
John T. Delane, of the _Times_, had the same gift, with talents and
knowledge far surpassing Cook's. A third and usually more interesting
form is found in the Editor who is himself an able writer, and who
imparts his own individuality to the journal he directs. Such an one
was Horace Greeley, who, in the days before the War of Secession, made
the _New York Tribune_ a power in America. Such another, of finer
natural quality, was Michael Katkoff, who in his short career did much
to create and to develop the spirit of nationality and imperialism in
Russia thirty years ago.

It was to this third form of the editorial profession that Mr. Godkin
belonged. He is the most remarkable example of it that has appeared in
our time--perhaps, indeed, in any time since the profession rose to
importance; and all the more remarkable because he was never, like
Greeley or Katkoff, the exponent of any widespread sentiment or potent
movement, but was frequently in opposition to the feeling for the
moment dominant.

Edwin Lawrence Godkin, the son of a Protestant clergyman and author,
was born in t