A man who writes in this way may have readers, but he can have no friends.  An event occurred in his first year which revealed this fact to him in an extremely disagreeable manner.  There was then upon the New York stage a notoriously dissolute actor, who, after outraging the feelings of his wife in all the usual modes, completed his infamy by denouncing her from the stage of a crowded theatre.  The Herald took her part, which would naturally have been the popular side.  But when the actor retorted by going to the office of the Herald and committing upon its proprietor a most violent and aggravated assault, accompanying his blows with acts of peculiar indecency, it plainly appeared, that the sympathies of the public were wholly with the actor,—­not with the champion of an injured woman.  His hand had been against every man, and in his hour of need, when he was greatly in the right, every heart was closed against him.  Not the less, however, did the same public buy his paper, because it contained what the public wanted, i.e. the news of the day, vividly exhibited.

The course of this curious specimen of our kind during the late war was perfectly characteristic.  During the first two years of the war he was inclined to think that the Rebels would be successful so far as to win over the Democratic party to their side, and thus constitute Jefferson Davis President of the United States.  If he had any preference as to the result of the contest, it was probably this.  If the flag of the United States had been trailed in the mud of Nassau Street, followed by hooting ruffians from the Sixth Ward, and the symbol of the Rebellion had floated in its stead from the cupola of the City Hall, saluted by Captain Rynders’s gun, it would not have cost this isolated alien one pang,—­unless, perchance, a rival newspaper had been the first to announce the fact. That indeed, would have cut him to the heart.  Acting upon the impression that the Rebellion, in some way, would triumph, he gave it all the support possible, and continued to do so until it appeared certain that, whatever the issue of the strife, the South was lost for a long time as a patron of New York papers.

The key to most of the political vagaries of this paper is given in a single sentence of one of its first numbers:  “We have never been in a minority, and we never shall be” In his endeavors to act upon this lofty principle, he was sadly puzzled during the war,—­so difficult was it to determine which way the cat would finally jump.  He held himself ready, however, to jump with it, whichever side the dubious animal might select.  At the same time, he never for an instant relaxed his endeavors to obtain the earliest and fullest intelligence from the seat of war.  Never perhaps did any journal in any country maintain so great an expenditure for news.  Every man in the field representing that