Two men have had it in their power to produce such a newspaper,—­Horace Greeley and Henry J. Raymond.  In 1841, when the Herald was six years old, the Tribune appeared, edited by Mr. Greeley, with Mr. Raymond as his chief assistant.  Mr. Greeley was then, and is now, the best writer of editorials in the United States; that is, he can produce a greater quantity of telling editorial per annum than any other individual.  There never lived a man capable of working more hours in a year than he.  Strictly temperate in his habits, and absolutely devoted to his work, he threw himself into this enterprise with an ardor never surpassed since Adam first tasted the sweets of honorable toil.  Mr. Raymond, then recently from college, very young, wholly inexperienced, was endowed with an admirable aptitude for the work of journalism, and a power of getting through its routine labors,—­a sustained, calm, swift industry,—­unsurpassed at that time in the American press.  The business of the paper was also well managed by Mr. McElrath.  In the hands of these able men, the new paper made such rapid advances, that, in the course of a few months, it was fairly established, and in a year or two it had reached a circulation equal to that of the Herald.  One after another, excellent writers were added to its corps;—­the vigorous, prompt, untiring Dana; George Ripley, possessing that blending of scholarship and tact, that wisdom of the cloister and knowledge of the world, which alone could fit a man of great learning and talent for the work of a daily newspaper; Margaret Fuller, whose memory is still green in so many hearts; Bayard Taylor, the versatile, and others, less universally known.

Why, then, did not this powerful combination supplant the Herald?  If mere ability in the writing of a newspaper; if to have given an impulse to thought and enterprise; if to have won the admiration and gratitude of a host of the best men and women in America; if to have inspired many thousands of young men with better feelings and higher purposes than they would else have attained; if to have shaken the dominion of superstition, and made it easier for men to think freely, and freely utter their thought; if to have produced a newspaper more interesting than any other in the world to certain classes in the community;—­if all these things had sufficed to give a daily paper the first position in the journalism of a country, then the Tribune would long ago have attained that position; for all these things, and many more, the Tribune did.  But they do not suffice.  Such things may be incidental to a great success:  they cannot cause it.  Great journalism—­journalism pure and simple—­alone can give a journal the first place.  If Mr. Raymond had been ten years older, and had founded and conducted the paper, with Mr. Greeley as his chief writer of editorials,—­that is, if the journalist had been the master of the journal, instead of the writer, the politician, and the philanthropist,—­the Tribune might