e not seen almost every man who has held or run for the
Presidency during the last ten or fifteen years paying assiduous and
servile court, directly or indirectly, or both, to the editor of the
Herald? If it were proper to relate to the public what is known on
this subject to a few individuals, the public would be exceedingly
astonished. And yet this reality of power an editor is ready to
jeopard for the sake of gratifying his family by exposing them in
Paris! Jeopard, do we say? He has done more: he has thrown it away. He
has a magnet in his binnacle. He has, for the time, sacrificed what it
cost him thirty years of labor and audacity to gain. Strange weakness
of human nature!

The daily press of the United States has prodigiously improved in
every respect during the last twenty years. To the best of our
recollection, the description given of it, twenty-three years ago, by
Charles Dickens, in his American Notes, was not much exaggerated;
although that great author did exaggerate its effects upon the morals
of the country. His own amusing account of the rival editors in
Pickwick might have instructed him on this latter point. It does not
appear that the people of Eatanswill were seriously injured by the
fierce language employed in "that false and scurrilous print, the
Independent," and in "that vile and slanderous calumniator, the
Gazette." Mr. Dickens, however, was too little conversant with our
politics to take the atrocious language formerly so common in our
newspapers "in a Pickwickian sense"; and we freely confess that in the
alarming picture which he drew of our press there was only too much
truth.

"The foul growth of America," wrote Mr. Dickens, "strikes
its fibres deep in its licentious press.

"Schools may be erected, east, west, north, and south;
pupils be taught, and masters reared, by scores upon scores
of thousands; colleges may thrive, churches may be crammed,
temperance may be diffused, and advancing knowledge in all
other forms walk through the land with giant strides; but
while the newspaper press of America is in or near its
present abject state, high moral improvement in that country
is hopeless. Year by year it must and will go back; year by
year the tone of public feeling must sink lower down; year
by year the Congress and the Senate must become of less
account before all decent men; and, year by year, the memory
of the grea