The story of the Sun, New York: 1833-1928 / by Frank M. O'Brien ; with an introduction by Edward Page Mitchell ...

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THE STORY OF "THE SUN"

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, 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