inet in 1870,
_The Nation_ said, "In peace as in war 'that is best blood which hath
most iron in't;' and much is to be excused to the man [that is, Judge
Hoar] who has for the first time in many years of Washington history
given a back-handed blow to many an impudent and arrogant dispenser of
patronage. He may well be proud of most of the enmity that he won while
in office, and may go back contented to Massachusetts to be her most
honored citizen."[192] Two months later Lowell wrote to Godkin, "The
bound volumes of _The Nation_ standing on Judge Hoar's library table, as
I saw them the other day, were a sign of the estimation in which it is
held by solid people and it is they who in the long run decide the
fortunes of such a journal."[193] But _The Nation_ lost Judge Hoar's
support. When I called upon him in 1893 he was no longer taking or
reading it.

It is the sum of individual experiences that makes up the influence of a
journal like _The Nation_, and one may therefore be pardoned the egotism
necessarily arising from a relation of one's own contact with it. In
1866, while a student at the University of Chicago, I remember well
that, in a desultory talk in the English Literature class, Professor
William Matthews spoke of _The Nation_ and advised the students to read
it each week as a political education of high value. This was the first
knowledge I had of it, but I was at that time, along with many other
young men, devoted to the _Round Table_, an "Independent weekly review
of Politics, Finance, Literature, Society, and Art," which flourished
between the years 1864 and 1868. We asked the professor, "Do you
consider _The Nation_ superior to the _Round Table_?"--"Decidedly," was
his reply. "The editors of the _Round Table_ seem to write for the sake
of writing, while the men who are expressing themselves in _The Nation_
do so because their hearts and minds are full of their matter." This was
a just estimate of the difference between the two journals. The _Round
Table_, modeled after the _Saturday Review_, was a feeble imitation of
the London weekly, then in its palmy days, while _The Nation_, which was
patterned after the _Spectator_, did not suffer by the side of its
model. On this hint from Professor Matthews, I began taking and reading
_The Nation_, and with the exception of one year in Europe during my
student days, I have read it ever since.

Before I touch on certain specifications I must premise that the
influen