We shall endeavor to make the _Sun_ worthy the confidence of the people in every part of the country. Its circulation is now more than fifty thousand copies daily. We mean that it shall soon be doubled; and in this, the aid of all persons who want such a newspaper as we propose to make will be cordially welcomed. CHARLES A. DANA, Editor and Manager. New York, January 25, 1868. Beneath this announcement was a farewell message from Moses Sperry Beach to the readers whom he had served for twenty years: With unreserved confidence in the ability of those who are to continue this work of my life, I lay aside an armor which in these latter years has been too loosely borne. So Moses S. Beach retired from journalism at forty-five. With the $175,000 paid to him for the _Sun_, and the profits he had made in his many years of ownership, he was easily rich enough to realize his dream of quiet rural life--a realization that lasted until his death in 1892. But who was this Dana who was taking up at forty-eight the burden that a younger man was almost wearily laying down? It is very likely that he was not well known to the readers of the _Sun_. The newspaper world knew him as one who had been the backbone of Greeley’s _Tribune_ in the turbulent period before the Civil War and for a year after the war was on. The army world knew him as the man who had been chosen by Lincoln and Stanton for important and confidential missions. Students knew him as one of the editors of the “New American Encyclopedia.” By many a fireside his name was familiar as the compiler of the “Household Book of Poetry.” Highbrows remembered him as one of the group of geniuses in the Brook Farm colony. In none of these categories were many of the men who ran with the fire-engines, voted for John Kelly, and bought the _Sun_. But the _Sun_ was the _Sun_; it was their paper, and they would have none other; and they would see what this Dana would do with it. CHAPTER IX THE EARLIER CAREER OF DANA _His Life at Brook Farm and His Tribune Experience.--His Break with Greeley, His Civil War Services and His Chicago Disappointment.--His Purchase of “The Sun.”_ Day and Dana each did a great thing for the _Sun_ and incidentally for journalism and for America. Day made humanity more intelligent by making newspapers popular. Dana made newspapers more intelligent by making them human. Day started the _Sun_ at twenty-three and left it at twenty-eight. Dana took the _Sun_ at forty-eight and kept it for thirty years. Each, in his time, was absolute master of the paper. “The great idea of Day’s time,” wrote E. P. Mitchell on the _Sun’s_ fiftieth birthday, fifteen years after Dana took hold, “was cheapness to the buyer. The great idea of the _Sun_ as it is, was and is interest to the reader.”