with constant care. Though we cannot accept his idea of the desirability of having a newspaper appear every day in the week," we may gladly acknowledge that he was right in what he meant when he called the Republican a religious paper. It was so in its own way, and it taught more religion and better, both practical and spiritual, than some of the non-secular sheets.

At eighteen, Mr. Bowles, by promising to take the main responsibility, persuaded his father to begin a daily issue of the Republican. It was not long before the paper showed his power, especially as slavery just then became an important factor in American politics. George Ashmun and W. B. Calhoun were outside helpers in writing, but the father and the son never failed to control the attitude of the paper in every respect. The town of Springfield grew rapidly, but the Republican grew faster yet. Competition could not live beside it. A staff of able men was gathered as the prosperity of the paper demanded and allowed. The Republican office became the best school of journalism in the country; young men from distant parts of the country asked to be taken in on almost any terms. In the art of making up a paper, in the collection, condensation, expression, and arrangement of news, it set higher examples than had been known before. It developed a new ideal of the place and work of the newspaper in American life. These matters are exhibited and discussed in three good chapters: "A Glance at the Republican," "The Ethics of News-giving," and "The Higher Journalism." If some clergymen would read the last two of these, they would understand better the value of a good newspaper in their communities for the very ends which they themselves are serving, they would have more sense of brotherhood with editors, and they would exercise their bishopric more largely by the help of printers' ink. These chapters magnify the office of him who has access to the public through the eye-gate, but they magnify that office no more than it deserves.

The Republican did all that one newspaper could to make partisan newspaper-work disreputable, but we fear that it will take many long years yet before really independent journalism is found in even half of the great newspapers of the country,

-so dear are bigotry and partisanship to the natural man. Published in a region where the tendency to make idols of party and the party-leaders is quite as strong as anywhere else in the country, it delighted in supporting mixed tickets. In gibing at party-papers as playing the part of attorneys for the defense, and in asserting that they should rather take the part of judges, it drew upon itself, sometimes with truth, the retort that it was a good deal more like a prosecuting attorney. It made itself at once hated and read: it won the name of a "journalistic scourge" and a "judgment-day." It was accused of censoriousness and offended multitudes of well-meaning people whose only notion of politics was that it dealt with the claims of this man, the reward of that man, for party-service, and the expediency of letting the other man have what he wanted. Amid all this the Republican did a great work in holding high and insisting upon the question of the public need as infinitely superior to the claims or wishes of any man or any company of men or any party. Upon corruption and favoritism it dropped the acid of its criticism and the fire of its denunciation in a way that burnt if it did not heal. It was often mistaken, sometimes enormously or ludicrously so, as in its reasons for favoring the nomination of Grant (ii. 39), but it always, as it had a right to do, forgot the things that were behind, pretending to no infallibility, but insisting on the right to say what seemed at the time to be true. It had the courage of its convictions, as in its support of Mr. Greeley. To say these things of the Republican is to say them of Mr. Bowles. He used sometimes to say: "You must remember that the Republican is one thing and Sam Bowles another," but no one believed him; he knew himself that it was a manifest evasion. The paper was instinct with his personality in every line.

That this man stirred up so much hostility may be attributed to two chief causes. The first is stated thus by Emerson: "He who by force of will or of thought is great and overlooks thousands, has the charges of that eminence. With every influx comes new danger. Has he light? he must bear witness to the light, and always outrun that sympathy which gives him such satisfaction, by his fidelity to new revelations of the in

cessant soul." Again and again he had the satisfaction of seeing the public, after rejecting his doctrine, come up to it in the course of time. The other chief cause of the hostility of which he was so often and so long the center was also in the man himself; he tended to feel most acutely that something was wrong when the general public quite approved his course. He was eager to break new and higher ground: he took it for granted that such advances would and must awake those bitterest kinds of hostility, the resentments of a disturbed conservatism and of a defeated greed. Woe was to him when all men spoke well of him. Almost in self-reproach, he studied the whole field of public and social life to find the need of change. And certainly he found plenty of room for improvement, and more and more to the end.

By nature or by force of this expectation he came to have a certain love of strife. Inverting that order by which men of ignoble natures, who are afraid, physically or morally, to disagree with their neighbors or customers or party-associates, make life wretched for their family and kindred and dependents and inalienable friends, he kept his household and his friendships with a wonderful sweetness and tenderness but as a journalist was ready to battle with the stoutest. Those contests called out the best of his power. He liked to have long bouts with the foe. To the great evil of political corruption he gave his chief attention in his last and best ten years.

After Mr. Bowles' death in January, 1878, the testimonies to his qualities as a journalist were second only to those which marked his value as a man. Said Mr. Horace White: "Mr. Bowles was the pioneer and leader of independent journalism in the United States. . . The truth, as he understood it, welled up within him, and must be uttered at all pains and costs." Said Mr. Bird: "I learned from him-I hope I have learned -absolute independence of partisanship in politics." In his mind an unworthy nomination must be denounced at once and the man defeated, no matter what it costs to the party, until the men into whose hands the nominations tend to fall shall give over daring to strive for the putting up of any but the best. This was his independence, and he carried it out, though it cost subscribers, and alienated friends and neighbors and

kinsmen. He could no other. That such independence is so much more common now than once it was, and that it has become so important a factor in politics to-day, is due to him more perhaps than to any other one man.

To return to his personal character: said Mr. C. D. Warner, "In his presence more than in the presence of almost any other man I have known, all pretense fell away." Said his pastor in a memorial discourse:

"If New England is to be saved from the all-devouring enemies of modern civilization,—a fanatical despotism and a Godless communism, --and kept abreast of the age, in the line of her great renown, it will be largely by the aid of such patient, intense, and catholic thinkers as Samuel Bowles."

It is small praise to say of any man, "We shall not look upon his like again." Such men as Mr. Bowles tend to perpetuate their kind. They have spiritual offspring. It is their greatness and their glory to be spiritual fathers to a mighty race, perhaps even greater and better than themselves. The manhood of the country will be better, the editorship of the country will be far better, because Samuel Bowles has lived.

ARTICLE II.-THE PLACE OF ENGLISH IN THE
COLLEGE CURRICULUM.

IT is now customary among the most advanced students of modern education to divide the area of collegiate studies into the three great departments of Science, Philosophy, Language and Literature. Although within the sphere of a liberal training there are some studies not strictly included in this division, it is for all practical purposes a convenient and comprehensive one. It is with the last of these three departments that the present paper will deal. We mean by English,-the English Language and Literature as including also, the subject of English Style and Criticism. The place of English as thus defined among other collegiate branches is one of the many open questions before the educators and the educated public of to-day. It is a question so prominent and so urgently pressing for discussion and adjustment, that it must in some way be met. In the recent Modern Language Convention held at Columbia College, N. Y., it elicited special interest and clearly indicated the drift of modern opinion regarding it. It is the object of the present discussion to say a word on its behalf, if so be the department of English in our American Colleges may be more truly appreciated and a more generous provision be made for its needs.

I.

THE PRESENT PLACE OF ENGLISH IN OUR COLLEGIATE SYSTEM.

It is patent to every careful observer of our educational methods that this place is one of decided inferiority. A cursory examination of the catalogues of our leading institutions will clearly reveal such an inferiority. In the oldest and what may be supposed to be the best regulated college of the country, we are told "that less than one half as much instruction is offered in English as in the ancient tongues." A more extreme statement might be made as to most of our important colleges. There are a few institutions indeed that constitute a pleasing exception. Such is Lafayette, "the first American College," as