r of popular 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 an one was Edwin Godkin. Since
the death of Abraham Lincoln, America has been generally more
influenced by her writers, preachers, and thinkers than by her
statesmen. In the list of those who have during the last forty years
influenced her for good and helped by their pens to make her 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 honour.

-----

[58] The Tammany leaders had him repeatedly arrested, usually on
Sunday mornings (that being the day on which it was least easy
to find bail) for alleged criminal libels upon them. These
prosecutions, threatened in the hope of intimidating him, never
went further.

[59] A Mugwump is in the Algonquin tongue an aged chief or wise man,
and the name was meant to ridicule the _ex cathedra_ manner
ascribed to the _Evening Post_.

LORD ACTON

When Lord Acton died on 19th June 1902, at Tegern See in Bavaria,
England lost the most truly cosmopolitan of her children, and Europe
lost one who was, by universal consent, in the foremost rank of her
men of learning. He belonged to an old Roman Catholic family of
Shropshire, a branch of which had gone to Southern Italy, where his
grandfather, General Acton, had been chief minister of the King of
Naples in the great war, at the time when the Bourbon dynasty
maintained itself in Sicily by the help of the British fleet, while
all Italy lay under the heel of Napoleon. His father, Sir Ferdinand
Acton, married a German lady, heiress of the ancient and famous house
of Dalberg, one of the great families of the middle Rhineland; so John
Edward Emerich Dalberg-Acton was born half a German, and connected by
blood with the highest aristocracy o