HOW TO GET STRONG
that a far wider and deeper intellectual culture had given him more unerring intuitions, greater breadth of vision and of sympathy, and a more powerful logical faculty. He had none of Greeley's premature cocksureness; and none of his ill-timed irresolution after the die was cast.
"As regards the scope and thoroughness of his literary accomplishments, he has never had an equal in this country within his own profession. Literature, however, represented only one side of his equipment. He was one of the few men who, despite the cares of business and the constant labors of an arduous profession, was able to keep pace with the current of scientific research and speculation; with the biological, botanical, astronomical, dynamical, and philosophical discoveries and tendencies of his own day.
"Once free to embody his view of the aims and standards of journalistic work, Mr. Dana produced a newspaper which, in this country, had no prototype in respect of keenness, comprehensiveness, and trustworthiness of observation; breadth and accuracy of knowledge; luminous and truthful scholarship; soundness of reasoning, and matured good sense. He justified the title of his journal, for in it he offered a daily conspectus of all that meets the solar rays. He believed that, not only as regards local incidents and local politics, but as regards the personages, events, movements, discoveries, and discussions of the world at large, the newspaper ought to be the abstract and brief chronicle, and we may add expounder, of the time. Besides discharging its former function, he thought that a daily journal should supplant the lecture-room, supplement the pulpit, and absorb the old-fashioned magazine and quarterly review.
"It was a position of unique distinction which Charles A. Dana occupied at the head of a profession to which he gave unprecedented dignity and a limitless horizon. He was, above most of his contemporaries, the man who should have been selected by wise citizens to serve the State. He would have had nothing to gain, however, by exchanging for a seat in the Senate, House, or in the White House, a desk which, for prestige and influence, might well be likened to a throne.—Mayo W. Hazeltine."
And Mr. Dana did other great work most helpful and attractive, too, to the entire community—work of lasting value. For, beside, his signal service to the country in the War Office; he and George422
