Edwin Lawrence Godkin, the son of a Protestant clergyman and author, was born in the 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.