With one or two exceptions, every change that he made in his position was due to his insistent desire to maintain his personal independence as a writer. He left the _Indianapolis Sentinel_ because he did not wish to conform to its political policy. His editorial work on the _New York World_ became irksome on this same account. He broke with the managers of the _Buffalo Courier_ in 1886 because he disliked Grover Cleveland and because he did not propose to stultify his editorial utterances in a newspaper whose proprietor was specially friendly at the time to the Buffalo President. He is said to have refused a flattering offer from Charles A. Dana to become editorial writer on the _New York Sun_ because he did not believe he could conform to Mr. Dana’s ideas, however much he might admire the genius of that brilliant editor. He set his editorial chair on a calm high level and from it addressed daily a clientele that loyally followed him in all his journeyings through fields of philosophy, history, poetry, romance and even the common things of everyday life. To read him once was to seek him again and remain his disciple. He might have made his fame rest on his poetry, but he subordinated that gift to his passion for regular, constant work in his editorial chair, indulging in flights of fancy only as a pastime. Mr. O’Connor was a master of the English language; indeed, it is doubtful if any man on the American press ever wrote it better. Some twenty years ago a correspondent of the _New York Sun_ asked Mr. Dana for information regarding literary style. In the course of his reply he said: “Among the newspaper writers of our own country and of the present day, perhaps the best style is that of Mr. Joseph O’Connor, the editor of _The Post Express_ of Rochester. It is terse, lucid, calm, argumentative, and without a trace of effort or affectation.” After quoting this tribute, said Father Cronin of the _Buffalo Union and Times_: “It is no small source of pride and gratification to us to know that one of the great princes of American journalism is an Irish American. Mr. O’Connor’s pen is like the Damascene blade, polished and beautiful, yet withal so smooth and keen that the victim of its blow is severed in twain almost without realizing the catastrophe. Long may Joseph O’Connor wield it, as he has always wielded it, a menace to evil and a swift and sure protection to the right.” All over the State of New York the daily and weekly papers, the day after his death, contained most flattering and affectionate tributes to his memory, and these were echoed and reinforced since by the press of the whole country, for “The Rochesterian” gave the key to the right solution of many a question to hundreds of editors who sought in the exchanges for “J. O’C’s” latest.