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

"THE SUN'S" PIIILOSOPIERS AND CRANKS 255
larities as to their likenesses of mental temper. Dana's
mind was optimistic, opportunist, vehement, easily assimilative of new opinions, sometimes cocksure at the very
first call. Goldwin Smith's mind-in some respects the
more arid-was ascetic in its habits, critical rather than
enthusiastic, prone to doubt rather than to ready acceptance. It is a curious fact that in their earlier phases of
development both of these great journalist-publicists were
deeply interested in the doctrines of socialistic philosophy.
Dana's Brook Farm experience, his sympathy for the
political transcendentalists of 1848, his flirtation (like
Greeley's) with Fourierism as translated to America by
Albert Brisbane and others, are too well remembered to
require recital. He went so far, indeed, in the direction
of anarchistic teaching as to expound, defend, and even
commend the ideas of Proudhon, the most violent of the
Besancon School, in a series of articles over his own initials in the Tribune, afterward revised by C. A. D. and
reprinted in 1849 in William Henry Channing's weekly
paper, the Spirit of the Age.
On the other hand, Goldwin Smith told me once that
he had been very intimate with Louis Blanc in London
and had discussed socialism with him in the most amicable
manner; that he had friends also in Mazzini and the advanced Italian Liberals; and that Giuseppe Garibaldi
was on the point of becoming his guest at Oxford when the
general was suddenly and strangely expelled from British
territory.
How little of that misconception of Canadian destiny
is now remembered in Canada! With what different feel

ings from those entertained in many quarters in the
eighties of the last century do the people of Toronto, for
instance, view the memorial to a great intellectual personality that stands in the shape of the beautiful gray old
Manse in the heart of that metropolitan city!