did. He had no equal before Greeley, and no superior later, in writing

editorials, and he made the intellectual influence of the _Evening Post_ one of the strongest in the nation. He was a great editor. But he could not have gone down into the busy ‘Change with his pencil as Bennett did; he could not have attended meetings, visited theaters, and mingled with common men in offices and on street corners, with Bennett’s constancy of purpose.

The _Evening Post_ had as much news as some sixpenny rivals, but it sadly needed the _Herald’s_ stimulus. Its reports of the great fire of 1835 were partly original, partly taken from the _Express_. When the Astor House was opened the following summer, an exciting event, it clipped its report from the _Daily Advertiser_--and even the latter had but one meager paragraph. Probably the most striking instance of its deficiency occurred in December, 1829, the month that Chancellor Lansing disappeared from the city streets--the greatest mystery of the kind in New York political history. The _Post’s_ only account was left by Lansing’s friends:

_Notice._--On Saturday evening, the 12th instant, Chancellor Lansing, of Albany, arrived in this city, and put up at the City Hotel; he breakfasted and dined there. Shortly after dinner he retired to his room and wrote for a short time, and about the hour that the persons intending to go to Albany usually leave the Hotel, he was observed to leave his room. He has not been seen or heard of since that time. He left his trunk, cane, etc., in his room. His friends in this city have heard this morning from Albany that he has not returned home.

It is supposed that he had written a letter to Albany and that he had intended to put it on board the steamboat that left here for that place at five o’clock that afternoon. He had made an engagement to take tea at six o’clock that evening with Mr. Robert Ray, of this city, who resides at No. 29 Marketfield Street.

He was dressed in black, and wore powder in his hair. He was a man of a large and muscular frame of body, and about five feet nine inches in height. He was upwards of seventy-six years of age. He was in good health, and has never been known to have been affected by any mental aberration. Any intelligence concerning him will be most gratefully acknowledged by his afflicted friends and family, if left for them, at the bar of the City Hotel.

No effort whatever was made to push an inquiry into this mystery, which a generation later would have made the press ring for weeks.

III

Bryant resumed his editorial chair in the Pine Street office on Feb. 16, 1836, and set heroically to work to restore the _Evening Post_. The net profits that year fell to $5,671.15, and in the panic year following to $3,242.76. Leggett was only slowly convalescing at his New Rochelle home, and the editor was assisted by Mason till the end of May, when he obtained the services of Henry J. Anderson, professor of mathematics at Columbia. He took a large furnished room on Fourth Street, and was accustomed to be in his office at seven o’clock in the morning. There was no money to hire many helpers, and until 1840 three men did practically all the writing. Bryant wrote the editorials and literary notices; his chief assistant, first Anderson and then Parke Godwin, clipped exchanges, furnished dramatic criticism, and contributed short editorial paragraphs; and another man acted as general reporter. Ship news was gathered by pilots in the common employ of the evening papers.

Yet in this moment of adversity occurred one of those displays of liberalism and enlightened judgment which are the special glory of the _Evening Post_. After Leggett’s illness, Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., had written an editorial (Nov. 14, 1835) arguing against the attitude of condemnation which nearly all employers then took toward labor unions, which were just beginning to find imperfect shape. He affirmed that the whole body social was interested in promoting the objects of these unions--in diminishing the hours of labor and increasing the wages of the mechanics. The laboring masses, under the principle of universal suffrage, held the government in their hands, and would exercise their power wisely only if they had education and prosperity. This was not the case: “compelled to labor the extremest amount that nature can endure, and receiving for that excessive labor a compensation which makes year after year of excessive toil necessary to obtain independence, what leisure have they to devote to the acquisition of ... knowledge ...?” Bryant felt precisely as Leggett and Sedgwick did on this subject. At the end of May, 1836, twenty-one journeymen tailors who had formed a union were indicted for a conspiracy injurious to trade and commerce, and after a three days’ trial in the court of Oyer and Terminer, Judge Edwards charged the jury to find them guilty. Bryant immediately (May 31) attacked him:

We do not admit, until we have further examined the question, that the law is as laid down by the Judge; but if it be, the sooner such a tyrannical and wicked law is abrogated the better. His doctrine has, it is true, a decision of the Supreme Court in its favor; but the reasoning by which he attempts to show the propriety of that decision is of the weakest possible texture. The idea that arrangements and combinations for certain rates of wages are injurious to trade and commerce, is as absurd as the idea that the current prices of the markets, which are always the result of understandings and combinations, are injurious.

The next day the tailors were heavily fined. The _Evening Post_, declaring this monstrous, showed its wicked absurdity in a series of clear expositions. It had been made criminal for the working classes to settle among themselves the price of their own property! According to Judge Edwards, the owners of the packets, who had agreed upon $140 as the standard fare to Liverpool, were criminals; so were the editors, who had agreed upon $10 for a yearly subscription; so were the butchers and bakers. The very price current was evidence of conspiracy. Bryant recalled the fact that in England the Tories themselves had expunged the laws against labor unions from the statute books twelve years before. “Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil.”

Other newspapers, of which the _Journal of Commerce_ and the _American_ were the most prominent, took the side of Judge Edwards. For a time the excitement was intense. A mass-meeting of mechanics, which the _Evening Post_ declared the largest ever seen in the city, was held in City Hall Park on the evening of June 13; and Bryant continued his editorials at intervals for a month.