The exposure of the moral nastiness in Brooklyn is a salutary thing. If, when the exposure of the scandal took place, the people had been indifferent--as indifferent as Beecher assumed to be--and had received no shock to their sense of purity and propriety, then the Jeremiahs might well have bewailed the turpitude of society and prophesied evil things for the country. Then, indeed, the poison would have been in the whole social atmosphere.... The Plymouth pastor, if a guiltless man, has brought all this trouble on himself by his cowardly course in dealing with the accusations against him.... If he is not a bold man, strong in the truth and in purity, what business has he to preach the religion of the Apostles to his fellow men--he who distributed Sharp’s rifles to the Kansas combatants with slavery, who denounced sin and bore his head high as a man of freedom of thought and action? To have kept himself consistent, he should not have dallied with Tilton and Moulton in secret, but if entrenched in innocence he should have dragged out their slanders and torn to pieces their plans from the pulpit where he had preached courage under difficulties, divine faith under sorrow, and bold encounter with sin. This would soon have expelled the poison lurking in the social atmosphere, but Beecher did not do it. Perhaps Beecher’s thanks were not due to Dana, but Grant’s surely were. It is impossible that scandals like those of the Whisky Ring could have lain hidden forever. If they had not been exposed when they were, they would have come to the top later, perhaps after Grant went out of office, and when his cry, “Let no guilty man escape!” would have been in vain. The _Sun’s_ fights against the scandals of the Grant period were no more bitter than its attacks on the frauds attending the Presidential election of 1876, although Dana had no cause for personal animosity toward Hayes. The _Sun’s_ chief Washington correspondent, A. M. Gibson, who handled many of the Grant scandals, wrote most of the news stories about the theft of the Presidency by Mr. Hayes’s managers. He also published in book form an official history of the fraud. Joseph Pulitzer, then newly come from the West, was assigned by Dana to cover the proceedings of the Electoral Commission in semieditorial style. Pulitzer was later, in 1878, a European correspondent of the _Sun_. CHAPTER XV “THE SUN” AND “HUMAN INTEREST” _Something About Everything, for Everybody.--A Wonderful Four-Page Paper.--A Comparison of the Styles of “Sun” Reporters in Three Periods Twenty Years Apart._