The idea that the editor of the _Sun_, which shines for all, could consent to become collector of the port of New York is extravagant and inadmissible. It would be stepping down and out with a vengeance. And yet we do not mean that the collector of New York need be other than an upright man. Moses H. Grinnell was such, and Tom Murphy, though a politician, a crony of Boss Grant, and one of the donors of Boss Grant’s cottage, certainly never took a dollar of money from the Federal Treasury to which he was not entitled. General Arthur, the present collector, is a gentleman in every sense of the word. The office of collector is respectable enough, but it is not one that the editor of the _Sun_ could desire to take without deserving to have his conduct investigated by a proceeding _de lunatico_. Dana and the _Sun_ lost friends because of the assaults on Grantism. The warfare was bitter and personal. In the case of Belknap, for instance, the _Sun_ was attacking a man whom Dana, having known him as a good soldier, had recommended for appointment as Secretary of War. But it must be recalled that at the very height of his antagonism to Grant, the President, Dana never receded from his opinion that Grant, the general, was the Union’s greatest soldier. And the _Sun_ was quick to applaud him as President when, as in currency matters, he took a course which Dana considered right. The friends of Grant, nevertheless, turned against Dana and his paper. Some of them, stockholders in the Sun Printing and Publishing Association, quit the concern when they found themselves unable to turn Dana from his purpose. All their pleadings were vain. “A few years from now,” Dana would reply, “I shall be willing to accept whatever judgment the nation passes on my course of action; but now I must do as I think right.” So far as the material prosperity of the _Sun_ was concerned, the desertion of Grant’s friends hurt it not a whit. For every reader lost, four or five were won. Men may stop reading a paper because it disgusts them; they rarely quit it because it is wounding them. “I don’t read the _Sun_,” said Henry Ward Beecher during his trial, “and don’t allow anybody to read it to me. What’s the good of a man sticking pins into himself?” The _Sun_ made this reply to Beecher’s assertion: Everybody reads the _Sun_--the good, that they may be stimulated to do better; the bad, in fear and trembling lest their wickedness shall meet its deserts. In Beecher’s case, as in Grant’s, the _Sun_ believed that it was doing a public service in laying open wrongful conditions. In answer to one who criticised its brutal candour about the Plymouth Church scandal the _Sun_ said: