John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[447] cheaper, but would afford sufficient support to the national authority to enable it to meet any emergency likely to arise, or in which it would be proper to use force at all. It regarded the continued presence of troops in the South as unnecessary and unwarranted, and contended that the greater the number of armed men at the disposal of the government, the greater the expense and the more powerful would be the temptation to use them in a manner which might prove oppressive to the people.

It is to be observed that Dana never ceased to deprecate the tendency, after the war was over, to call upon the Federal government in every matter thought to be of national importance, instead of depending upon the State authorities, whose special duty in our system of government is to take care of local and domestic interests. In this he was not only a true Democrat, but had the support of many conservative statesmen of all parties from the earliest days of the republic to the present time. Indeed, there was no political controversy on this subject. The only question was as to how many officers and men were absolutely necessary to keep alive the military spirit, maintain order, and take proper care of the fortifications. About this it was easy for the most conservative men to differ. Although the Congress failed to adopt the extreme view of it that Dana advanced, it took good care that the army should never be large enough to create a military class or to menace the rights of the people in any section.

Throughout the administrations of Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur, while there were many important matters of national policy to be discussed, the speedy and, on the whole, the satisfactory removal of the Southern question from current politics left the great newspapers much more time for the consideration of purely social and economic questions than they had had since the close of the war. Dana having had the unusual satisfaction of seeing most