t about the affairs of their country,
(_their_ country, not his,) it was because the people were not behind
the scenes, were dupes of their party leaders, were a parcel of fools.
In short, he acquired his insight into political craft in the school
of Tammany Hall and the Kitchen Cabinet. His value was not altogether
unappreciated by the politicians. He was one of those whom they use
and flatter during the heat of the contest, and forget in the
distribution of the spoils of victory.

He made his first considerable hit as a journalist in the spring of
1828, when he filled the place of Washington correspondent to the New
York Enquirer. In the Congressional Library, one day, he found an
edition of Horace Walpole's Letters, which amused him very much. "Why
not," said he to himself, "try, a few letters on a similar plan from
this city, to be published in New York?" The letters appeared. Written
in a lively manner, full of personal allusions, and describing
individuals respecting whom the public are always curious,--free also
from offensive personalities,--the letters attracted much notice
and were generally copied in the press. It is said that some of the
ladies whose charms were described in those letters were indebted to
them for husbands. Personalities of this kind were a novelty then,
and mere novelty goes a great way in journalism. At this period
he produced almost every kind of composition known to periodical
literature,--paragraphs and leading articles, poetry and love-stories,
reports of trials, debates, balls, and police cases; his earnings
ranging from five dollars a week to ten or twelve. If there had been
then in New York one newspaper publisher who understood his business,
the immense possible value of this man as a journalist would have been
perceived, and he would have been secured, rewarded, and kept under
some restraint. But there was no such man. There were three or four
forcible writers for the press, but not one journalist.

During the great days of "The Courier and Inquirer," from 1829 to
1832, when it was incomparably the best newspaper on the continent,
James Gordon Bennett was its most efficient hand. It lost him in 1832,
when the paper abandoned General Jackson and took up Nicholas Biddle;
and in losing him lost its chance of retaining the supremacy among
American newspapers to this day. We can truly say, that at that time
journalism, as a thing by itself and for itself, had no existence in
the Unit