Dana liked “It Shines for All,” the _Sun’s_ old motto--everybody liked it, but only one newspaper, the _Herald_, ever had the effrontery to pilfer it--but he took it from the scroll in the emblem and replaced there the State motto, “Excelsior.” The _Sun_, under its new master, rose auspiciously--master, not masters, for in spite of the number of his financial associates, Dana was absolute. The men behind him realized the folly of dividing authority. The _Sun_, whether under Day or one of the Beaches, had always been a one-man paper. Therefore it succeeded, just as the _Herald_, another journal governed by an autocrat, went ahead; but with the _Tribune_, where the stockholders ruled and argued, things were different. Dana was the boss. As General Wilson wrote in his biography: From this time forth it may be truthfully said that Dana was the _Sun_, and the _Sun_ Dana. He was the sole arbiter of its policy, and it was his constant practice to supervise every editorial contribution that came in while he was on duty. The editorial page was absolutely his, whether he wrote a line in it or not, and he gave it the characteristic compactness of form and directness of statement which were ever afterward its distinguishing features. Dana was a man whose natural intellectual gifts had been augmented by his travels, his experience on the _Tribune_, his exploits in the war, and his association with the big men of his time. Add to all this his solid financial backing and his acquirement of a paper with a large circulation, and the combination seemed an assurance of success. Yet, had Dana lacked the peculiarly human qualities that were his, the indefinable newspaper instinct that knows when a tom-cat on the steps of the City Hall is more important than a crisis in the Balkans, the _Sun_ would have set. Only genius could enable a lofty-minded Republican, with a Republican aristocracy behind him, to take over the _Sun_ and make a hundred thousand mechanics and tradesmen, nearly all Democrats, like their paper better than ever before. And that is what Dana did, except that he added to the _Sun’s_ former readers a new army of admirers, recruited by the magic of his pen. CHAPTER X DANA: HIS “SUN” AND ITS CITY _The Period of the Great Personal Journalists.--Dana’s Avoidance of Rules and Musty Newspaper Conventions.--His Choice of Men and His Broad Definition of News._