Besides this contraction of the affections, there was also manifest in his first journalistic venture a deficiency in the organ of vision, a failure to see into things and their relations.

What he saw he reported faithfully, suppressing nothing, adding nothing.

But the objects which passed across the disk of his editoral intelligence were confined almost entirely to the surface of things, to the superficies of national life.

He had not the ken at twenty to penetrate beneath the happenings of current politics.

Of the existence of slavery as a supreme reality, we do not think that he then had the faintest suspicion.