without a hearing. Even the office boy was allowed to present the best excuse he could for himself when he mislaid things and caused trouble.

"Mr. Reid has been a very much caricatured man in his time. Undoubtedly all manner of ridiculous distortions of his figure and physiognomy will appear in this campaign. Caricaturists are generally good-natured fellows and cherish no malice against any one, and doubtless it will be a source of genuine satisfaction to those of them who will be called upon to exercise their art upon Mr. Reid to be assured that he won't mind it at all. He knows very well that no man gets caricatured unless he amounts to something. Despite the fact that he is of Scotch extraction, and therefore presumably born with a prejudice against jokes, particularly those of which he is the butt, he can even appreciate a caricature of himself when it is well done. In the Blaine campaign I often saw him laugh heartily at some of Puck's best cartoons in which he himself was a conspicuous and ludicrous figure. He is not a man whom the caricaturist can afford to ignore. He can't be treated as Tom Nast treated poor Gratz Brown, whom he recognized merely by tagging on a placard bearing his name to Greeley's coat tails.

"Mr. Reid is not the sort of man who would be called thick-skinned. But he has learned by experience that coarse vituperation and abuse do not injure a man in public estimation to anything like the extent the authors of it imagine; that, in fact, so far as a man's personal feelings are concerned, it need not hurt him any more than he chooses to let it. He has been subjected to a considerable amount of it at various times.

"As his secretary it was one of my duties to lay before him any extended personal references to him, attacks or criticisms in other newspapers. I remember on one occasion calling his attention to a long article in which he was depicted as a regular dyed-in-the-wool sort of villain, such as always meets with a horrible death in the last act of a Bowery melodrama.

"After glancing over it Mr. Reid remarked with a contemptuous smile: That sort of thing never hurts a man. It only inspires contempt for its author. The man who writes that way throws a boomerang that will miss its mark and hit himself.'

"For some years previous to his appointment as Minister to France, Mr. Reid did very little editorial writing himself. In fact, he did very little writing of any sort personally. The pen is too slow for a busy man to wield. It was, and is still, his habit to dictate all his letters except those of a strictly private

character. He dictates well, speaking with fluency and precision. He appreciates the value of brevity in correspondence. He always aims to say what he has to say in the fewest possible words. After dictating a letter he would sometimes ask to have it read back to him to see if he couldn't shorten it. Most of the little editorial work he did he also dictated.

"Before he went abroad Mr. Reid and no one else ran the Tribune. He exercised a general supervision over the business as well as the editorial department. It was his habit to spend an hour in the counting-room every morning before ascending to his editorial sanctum in the tall tower. Editors as a rule are not good business men, but Mr. Reid, as I. have said before, is an exception to that rule, happily for himself, for I have no doubt that hour spent in the counting-room every day proved a most profitable investment of time.

is one of the things which Mr. Reid thoroughly understands. He has done some phenomenally hard work in his time. He can do it again if the necessity should arise. But he is not the man to make of himself a slave to work when he can hire others to do much of the work for him. That would be the sheerest kind of folly. "He is possessed of executive talents of a high order. No man who isn't could run a big newspaper satisfactorily. His policy is to select for the heads of departments the men who will best carry out his ideas and allow them pretty full swing. He values money not for its own sake, but for the opportunities for rare enjoyment and culture that it brings. That is shown by his style of living. He knows how to take it easy,' but at the same time he is constitutionally incapable of being lazy.

66 He is in no sense a narrow man. He has too much breadth of forehead for that. Although a partisan, his natural habit of mind is to look on both sides of a question. Although a Republican from conviction-for he was among the first to advocate Lincoln's nomination, and subsequently stumped Ohio for him—I have no doubt that he could run a Democratic paper just as effectively as he did the Tribune.

"It is much to be regretted that Mr. Reid has not written more for the Tribune of late years. He is an exceedingly lucid and vigorous writer, apt in illustration, forceful in expression and straightforward and direct in style. He can jump on anything, figuratively speaking, about as hard as any man I know of. Long before he joined the Tribune he made Horace Greeley his model. He fully appreciated his worth and ability, as this passage, which I find in an address that he once delivered, shows:

"Most true it is that the foremost editorial writer of our time has had and is to have no successor. Horace Greeley stood alone, without a peer and without a rival-not, perhaps, the ideal editor, but, fairly judged, the ablest master of controversial English and the most successful popular educator the journalism of the English-speaking world has yet developed.'

"I have said that Mr. Reid is an eminently practical man. He is also a man of ideas. I wish that space permitted me to quote freely from an address which he delivered before the editorial associations of New York and Ohio when he was still the boy editor,' as he used to be called. It contains some interesting speculations concerning the tendencies of modern journalism. But one or two passages must suffice:

"This then I conceive to be the next great revolution in journalism. We shall not have cheaper newspapers. They are the cheapest thing sold now, considering the cost of making them. We shall not have continually growing supplement upon supplement of advertising. Individual wants will seek mediums more suitable. Only general wants will need the wider publicity of great journals, and these will be kept, by the increasing cost, within manageable compass. We shall not have more news. The world is ransacked for it now. Earth, sea and air carry to us from every capital, from every people, from every continent and from every island. We shall not have bigger newspapers; they are bigger now than a busy people can read. We shall have better newspapers-the story better told, better brains employed in the telling, briefer papers, papers dealing with the more important of current matters in such style and with such fascination that they will command the widest interest. There will be more care and ability in selecting out of the myriad of things you might tell the things that the better people want to be told, or ought to be told. There will be greater skill in putting these things before them in the most convenient and attractive shape. Judgment in selecting the news, genius in telling it-that is the goal for the highest journalistic effort of the future. In making a newspaper, the heaviest item of expense used to be the white paper. Now it is the news. By and by, let us hope, it will be the brains.'

"By the way, it was in this same address that he anticipated by many years the injunction of another famous editor concerning advertisements. He did it in this terse fashion:

"Keep the advertising in the advertising columns.'"

III.

Consecrated to the Tribune-In Control-The new Building-President of the Lotos Club-Union League-Declines proffered Political Appointments-Regent of the University of New York -Active in Charities-Authorship-Marriage-City Residence-Ophir Farm.

HITELAW REID consecrated himself to the Tribune. His familiar form, erect and distingué, with hair longer and curlier than latterly, was a familiar sight on Broadway every morning shortly before noon as he found needed outdoor exercise in walking down to his office.

As soon as he had become president of the Tribune Publishing Company, and acquired a controlling number of its shares (through the kind assistance, it is generally understood, of the Hon. William Walter Phelps), Reid projected the present magnificent architectural pile known as the Tribune Building, one of the finest on Printing House Square, the rentals from which, it is almost superfluous to add, yield a handsome profit on the investment and a large share of the company's income.

In 1872 Reid was elected president of the Lotos Club, a well-known association of journalists, artists, and actors, and held the position, with the exception of a brief term filled by the late John Brougham, for fourteen years. In that time he presided at all the banquets given by the club to many distinguished men, including Stanley, Froude, Kingsley, De Lesseps, Irving, Bartholdi, Wilkie Collins, and other foreign and home celebrities.

One of his first speeches in New York-for his abilities as an orator were not then generally known-was the following welcome address to Henry M. Stanley, at the Lotos Club, in 1872:

"Gentlemen of the Lotos: A club so largely composed of journalists and of members of the kindred professions may be pardoned a special pride in the pluckiest achievement that adorns the history of recent American journalism.

As Col. Finlay Anderson, who was chief of the Herald bureau in London at the time, has told you, we have the pleasure of meeting to-night the man that did it, and of bidding him the most cordial and hearty of welcomes home again. He has been gone from us since 1868. For two-thirds of the time he has been buried in a region which is now absolutely the least known, the most mysterious, and the most inaccessible land on the face of the habitable globe. He undertook a task in which the Royal Geographical Society of London had failed; in which we may say the British government had failed. Of the difficulties, the discouragements, the dangers there is no need to speak. He succeeded!

"Looking back now at what he braved and what he did, we may fairly say that for nerve, for pertinacity, for tact in avoiding obstacles or for courage in overcoming them, the world will accord our young American newspaper correspondent his well-earned place in the honored ranks of the African explorers. If he had done this thing three thousand years ago, some old Greek might have fancied the quest for Livingstone as worthy the loving treatment of poetry and genius as the quest for a captured princess. If it had been his easier fortune to do it to martial music, under the guns of two contending hosts and the eyes of a continent, it might have been sung in the verses of the laureate or embalmed in the more stately eulogium of a Kinglake. Or, if it failed, as everybody but its spirited projector, the owner of the Herald, expected it would, some new Cervantes, in treating of this new Quixotic adventure, might at least have paid tribute to the courage and devotion to professional duty which our guest displayed. But it lacks all glamour of tradition, or romance, or poetry. It is the plain, matter-of-fact work of a New York newspaper correspondent. He was merely told to go to the heart of Africa and find a lost explorer whom the power of the British government had failed to find.

"Everybody laughed when he started; everybody laughed when he was referred to while he was gone. Now that he comes back crowned with the laurels of the amplest success, if we do not make a romantic hero of him, let us at least give him just honor for what he has done; and award just recognition to that splendid spirit in modern journalism which secures more unquestioning obedience, more enthusiastic zeal, and greater success than cabinets and parliaments were able to attain. It was an old Frenchman who said: 'It is a great sign of mediocrity to praise always sparingly.' Whatever he may find his countrymen, our guest will at least not find them a people of mediocrities. He will find them everywhere, as he sees them here to-night, proud of his achievement, proud of