he county of Wicklow, in Ireland, in 1831. He was
educated at Queen's College, Belfast, read for a short time for the
English bar, but drifted into journalism by accepting the post of
correspondent to the London _Daily News_ during the Crimean War in
1853-54. The horror of war which he retained through his life was due
to the glimpse of it he had in the Crimea. Soon afterwards he went to
America, was admitted to the bar in New York, but never practised,
spent some months in travelling through the Southern States on
horseback, learning thereby what slavery was, and what its economic
and social consequences, was for two or three years a writer on the
_New York Times_, and ultimately, in 1865, established in New York a
weekly journal called the _Nation_. This he continued to edit, writing
most of it himself, till 1881, when he accepted the editorship of the
_New York Evening Post_, an old and respectable paper, but with no
very large circulation. The _Nation_ continued to appear, but became
practically a weekly edition of the _Evening Post_, or rather, as some
one said, the _Evening Post_ became a daily edition of the _Nation_,
for the tone and spirit that had characterised the _Nation_ now
pervaded the _Post_. In 1900 failing health compelled him to retire
from active work, and in May 1902 he died in England. Journalism left
him little leisure for any other kind of literary production; but he
wrote in early life a short history of Hungary; and a number of
articles which he had in later years contributed to the _Nation_ or to
magazines were collected and published in three volumes between 1895
and 1900. They are clear and wise articles, specially instructive
where they deal with the most recent aspects of democracy. But as they
convey a less than adequate impression of the peculiar qualities which
established his fame, I pass on to the work by which he will be
remembered, his work as a weekly and daily public writer.

He was well equipped for this career by considerable experience of the
world, by large reading, for though not a learned man, he had
assimilated a great deal of knowledge on economical and historical
subjects, and by a stock of positive principles which he saw clearly
and held coherently. In philosophy and economics he was a Utilitarian
of the school of J. S. Mill, and in politics what used to be called a
philosophical Radical, a Radical of the less extreme type, free from
sentiment and from prejudices, but e