d of cutting one another's throats, go after Cincinnati and
St. Louis. You will recall that I proposed this to you in the beginning.
What is the matter with it now?"

Nothing was the matter with it. He agreed at once. The details were soon
adjusted. Ten days later there appeared upon the doorsteps of the city
in place of the three familiar visitors, a double-headed stranger,
calling itself the Courier-Journal. Our exclusive possession of the
field thus acquired lasted two years. At the end of these we found that
at least the appearance of competition was indispensable and willingly
accepted an offer from a proposed Republican organ for a division of the
Press dispatches which we controlled. Then and there the real prosperity
of the Courier-Journal began, the paper having made no money out of its
monopoly.

IV

Reconstruction, as it was called--ruin were a fitter name for it--had
just begun. The South was imprisoned, awaiting the executioner. The
Constitution of the United States hung in the balance. The Federal Union
faced the threat of sectional despotism. The spirit of the time was
martial law. The gospel of proscription ruled in Congress. Radicalism,
vitalized by the murder of Abraham Lincoln and inflamed by the
inadequate effort of Andrew Johnson to carry out the policies of
Lincoln, was in the saddle riding furiously toward a carpetbag Poland
and a negroized Ireland.

The Democratic Party, which, had it been stronger, might have
interposed, lay helpless. It, too, was crushed to earth. Even the
Border States, which had not been embraced by the military agencies
and federalized machinery erected over the Gulf States, were seriously
menaced. Never did newspaper enterprise set out under gloomier auspices.

There was a party of reaction in Kentucky, claiming to be Democratic,
playing to the lead of the party of repression at the North. It refused
to admit that the head of the South was in the lion's mouth and that
the first essential was to get it out. The Courier-Journal proposed to
stroke the mane, not twist the tail of the lion. Thus it stood between
two fires. There arose a not unnatural distrust of the journalistic
monopoly created by the consolidation of the three former dailies into
a single newspaper, carrying an unfamiliar hyphenated headline. Touching
its policy of sectional conciliation it picked its way perilously
through the cross currents of public opinion. There was scarcely
a sinister purpose