ebrating its last service over the dead body of Walker, witnessed
one of the three most impressive funerals which Boston has seen for at
least sixteen years--a funeral conspicuous for the attendance of a large
number of delegates from colleges and learned societies.

Walker was distinctly of the intellectual elite of the country. But _The
Nation_ made not the slightest reference to his death. In the issue of
January 7, appearing two days later, I looked for an allusion in "The
Week," and subsequently for one of those remarkable and discriminating
eulogies, which in smaller type follow the editorials, and for which
_The Nation_ is justly celebrated; but there was not one word. You might
search the 1897 volume of _The Nation_ and, but for a brief reference in
the April "Notes" to Walker's annual report posthumously published, you
would not learn that a great intellectual leader had passed away. I
wrote to a valued contributor of _The Nation_, a friend of Walker, of
Godkin, and of Wendell P. Garrison (the literary editor), inquiring if
he knew the reason for the omission, and in answer he could only tell me
that his amazement had been as great as mine. He at first looked
eagerly, and, when the last number came in which a eulogy could possibly
appear, he turned over the pages of _The Nation_ with sorrowful regret,
hardly believing his eyes that the article he sought was not there.

Now I suspect that the reason of this extraordinary omission was due to
the irreconcilable opinions of Walker and Godkin on a question of
finance. It was a period when the contest between the advocates of a
single gold standard and the bimetallists raged fiercely, and the
contest had not been fully settled by the election of McKinley in 1896.
Godkin was emphatically for gold, Walker equally emphatic for a double
standard. And they clashed. It is a notable example of the peculiarity
of Godkin, to allow at the portal of death the one point of political
policy on which he and Walker disagreed to overweigh the nine points in
which they were at one.

Most readers of _The Nation_ noticed distinctly that, from 1895 on, its
tone became more pessimistic and its criticism was marked by greater
acerbity. Mr. Rollo Ogden in his biography shows that Godkin's feeling
of disappointment over the progress of the democratic experiment in
America, and his hopelessness of our future, began at an earlier date.

During his first years in the United States, he had no