Six or seven dreary columns are filled with leading articles, no matter whether there are subjects to discuss of public interest, or brains at hand to treat them. Our big contemporaries exhaust their young men and drive them too hard. The stock of ideas is not limitless, even in a New York newspaper office. Another thing has been bad. Men with actual capacity of certain sorts for acceptable writing have been frightened off from doing natural and vigorous work by certain newspaper critics and doctrinaires who are in distress if the literary proprieties are seemingly violated, and if the temper and blood of the writer actually show in his work. They measure our journalistic production by an English standard, which lays it down as its first and most imperative rule that editorial writing shall be free from the characteristics of the writer. This is ruinous to good writing, and damaging to the sincerity of writers.... If we choose to glow or cry out in indignation, we do so, and we are not a bit frightened at the sound of our own voice. Dana himself had that peculiar faculty, as indescribable as instinct, of knowing, when he saw an article in the paper, just how much work the author of it had put in--particularly in cases where the labour had been in leaving out, rather than in writing. As a result of this intuition he never drove his men. He would accept three lines or three columns for a day’s work, and his admiration might go out more heartily to the three lines. As for the appearance of characteristics in men’s writing, that was as necessary, in Dana’s opinion, as it was wicked in the judgment of the ancient editors. CHAPTER XIV “THE SUN” AND THE GRANT SCANDALS _Dana’s Relentless Fight Against the Whisky Ring, Crédit Mobilier, “Addition, Division, and Silence,” the Safe Burglary Conspiracy and the Boss Shepherd Scandal._ The first ten years of Dana’s service on the _Sun_ were marked by the uprooting of many public evils. To use the mild phrasing of the historian John Fiske, “Villains sometimes succeeded in imposing upon President Grant, who was an honest, simple-hearted soldier without much knowledge of the ways of the world.” To say it more concretely, hardly a department of the national government but was alive with fraud. The _Sun_, which had supported Grant in the election of 1868, turned against his administration in its first months, and for years it continued to keep before the public the revelations of corruption--which were easily made, so bold were the scoundrels, so coarse their manner of theft. Among the scandals which the _Sun_ either brought to light or was most vigorous in assailing, these were the principal: