Low as he had fallen, both in the public estimation and his own, we were astonished to learn last evening that Colonel Webb had stooped so far beneath anything of which we had ever conceived it possible for him to be guilty, as publicly, and before the eyes of hundreds who knew him, to descend to a public personal chastisement of that villainous libel on humanity of all kinds, the notorious vagabond Bennett. But so it is. As the story is told to us by an eye-witness, the colonel met the brawling coward in Wall Street, took him by the throat, and with a cowhide striped the human parody from head to foot. For the space of nearly twenty minutes, as we are told, did the right arm of the colonel ply his weapon with unremitted activity, at which time the bystanders, who evidently enjoyed the scene mightily, interceded in behalf of the suffering, supplicating wretch, and Webb suffered him to run. Had it been a dog, or any other decent animal, or had the colonel himself with a pair of good long tongs removed a polecat from his office, we know not that we would have been so much surprised; but that he could, by any possibility, have so far descended from himself as to come in public contact with the veriest reptile that ever defiled the paths of decency, we could not have believed. Webb’s quarrel with Bennett grew out of the _Herald’s_ financial articles. Bennett was the first newspaperman to see the news value of Wall Street. When he was a writer on the _Courier and Enquirer_, and one of Webb’s most useful men, he made a study of stocks, not as a speculator, but as an investigator. He had a taste for money matters. In 1824, five years after his arrival in America from the land of his birth, Scotland, he tried to establish a commercial school in New York and to lecture on political economy. He could not make a go of it, and so returned to newspaper work as reporter, paragrapher, and poet. In 1828 he became Washington correspondent of the _Enquirer_, and it was at his suggestion that Webb, in 1829, bought that paper and consolidated it with his own _Courier_. Bennett was a Tammany Society man, therefore a Jacksonian. He left Webb because of Webb’s support of Nicholas Biddle, and started a Jackson organ, the _Pennsylvanian_, in Philadelphia. This was a failure. Meanwhile Bennett had seen the _Sun_ rise, and he felt that there must be room for another penny paper in New York. With his knowledge of stocks he believed that he could make Wall Street news a telling feature. In his second issue of the _Herald_, May 11, 1835, he printed the first money-market report, and three days later he ran a table of sales on the Stock Exchange. At this time, and for three years afterward, Bennett visited Wall Street daily and wrote his own reports.