ire each student to take a copy of _The Nation_. Do not profess
history for them in any other way. I dare say your lectures would be
good, but why limit your pupils to hundreds which are now counted by
thousands?"[187]

As is well known, Godkin relinquished the idea of the college connection
and stuck to his job, although the quiet and serenity of a professor's
life in Cambridge contrasted with his own turbulent days appealed to him
powerfully. "Ten years hence," he wrote to Norton, "if things go on as
they are now I shall be the most odious man in America. Not that I shall
not have plenty of friends, but my enemies will be far more numerous and
active." Six years after he had founded _The Nation_, and one year after
he had declined the Harvard professorship, when he was yet but forty
years old, he gave this humorously exaggerated account of his physical
failings due to his nervous strain: "I began _The Nation_ young,
handsome, and fascinating, and am now withered and somewhat broken,
rheumatism gaining on me rapidly, my complexion ruined, as also my
figure, for I am growing stout."[188]

But his choice between the Harvard professorship and _The Nation_ was a
wise one. He was a born writer of paragraphs and editorials. The files
of _The Nation_ are his monument. A crown of his laborious days is the
tribute of James Bryce: "_The Nation_ was the best weekly not only in
America but in the world."[189]

Thirty-five years of journalism, in which Godkin was accustomed to give
hard blows, did not, as he himself foreshadowed, call forth a unanimous
chorus of praise; and the objections of intelligent and high-minded men
are well worth taking into account. The most common one is that his
criticism was always destructive; that he had an eye for the weak side
of causes and men that he did not favor, and these he set forth with
unremitting vigor without regard for palliating circumstances; that he
erected a high and impossible ideal and judged all men by it; hence, if
a public man was right eight times out of ten, he would seize upon the
two failures and so parade them with his withering sarcasm that the
reader could get no other idea than that the man was either weak or
wicked. An editor of very positive opinions, he was apt to convey the
idea that if any one differed from him on a vital question, like the
tariff or finance or civil service reform, he was necessarily a bad man.
He made no allowances for the weaknesses of human na