Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

CHAPTER IV

HOW I WENT TO "THE SUN"
I
THE two Dingleys of the Lewiston Journal begat a sort
of binary editorship, unlike any that I have observed elsewhere, and productive of one of the best of the many good
newspapers in the smaller cities of the United States.
Nelson, the elder, whose name is perpetuated nationally
in the annals of tariff legislation and whose political career
has been recorded adequately by his son, Edward N.
Dingley, was an able politician, a man of serious and
acute, though by no means arid, intellect, a true-love
student of economic questions, and an uncompromising
partisan of the Republican organization. Barring Horace
Greeley, it is doubtful if there ever existed an editor
mentally happier in a tangle of election returns, even
when the pluralities went the wrong way. Happier yet
was he when with pencil and pad and figures afforded
without effort by an astonishing statistical memory he
was ciphering out the probable yield and practical effect
of some proposed change in customs duties or internalrevenue tax.
At such times something like the joy of paternity lit
his rather saturnine features. I used to suspect him of
cherishing secretly a romantic ambition to construct
some day for his country a complete set of schedules.
That fortune did in fact come to this just, kind, arithmetical, and ineffusive gentleman nearly a score of years later
w hen he had so much to do with the tariff of 1890 that
McKinley afterward said, "It was a Dingley bill, rather
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