John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[431] the government over to Greeley and the secession Democrats. While no one can say positively what would have been the result of a reform administration at that time, assisted as it must have been by Senators Trumbull and Schurz, besides many other Independent Republicans of importance, it may now be plausibly contended that the country acted wisely in re-electing Grant, instead of trying a dangerous experiment. And this view of the case will appear all the more reasonable when it is recalled that, in spite of much work which yet remained to be done to “turn the rascals out,” the Republican administration, and public life generally, had come to be pretty well purified by the end of Grant's second term. To this no one contributed more than Dana.

While the country's decision, not to intrust its government in the hands of the Democratic party, had silenced its leaders or consigned them to secondary positions in Congress or elsewhere, fortunately it had not silenced the independent press. The Sun, ably seconded by the Chicago Tribune, the leading Republican newspaper of the Northwest, and by the Springfield Republican, the most influential journal of New England, continued its campaign against fraud and corruption with unflagging zeal and undaunted courage. Its columns contained not only a daily epitome of the world's history, but of the history of the United States as well. No important event in politics, or in the practical administration of municipal, State, or national government, escaped its notice or its comment. The Sun had now become the most widely read and widely quoted journal of the country. Its daily circulation had passed far beyond a hundred thousand copies. It had become famous, not only for its unsparing criticism of every class of public act and deed that it did not approve, but for the vigor and clearness of its style. “Boil it down” --state it in the fewest possible words-had come to be the rule which