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HOW TO GET STRONG
ing, now this leader, now that, up in such a glare of light that the strain was too strong for him—the strain of truth; and until they fear his pen almost as much as Tweed and his Tammany men did Nast's pencil, when they got thirteen million dollars for building a court-house of miserable, make-believe marble, already reeking with rotten iron-juice; and so dark, ill-ventilated, and unhealthy that judges forced to sit within its walls wither and droop and die; until the higher branch of the court would stand it no longer, and went bodily away to quarters wholesome, attractive, and a worthy home for men to whom such great powers are intrusted. No other great editor whom America has yet produced can so quickly throw his ablest rivals off their guard, till they descend to the resort of most people who run out of argument—personal abuse. Always master of his case; buttressing it with clear, ringing arguments, drawn from a marvellous storehouse of knowledge, both of the present and of the past, pressed home with relentless logic; despising all private gain and emolument; whoever differing, faces him, knows that he will have all the fighting he wants, and the fighting always of a gentleman. No man has crossed swords with him oftener than Mr. Dana—(two rare, strong men). But when, in one of his many arrests for his fearless denunciation of some political though popular malefactor, he was coarsely, wellnigh brutally, treated; Mr. Dana sprang to his defence, and insisted that such work cease. And it did. The swiftest of our editors to see whether some cause—for the moment popular, and carrying the people away by impulse—is right; the foremost, if it is wrong, to dash to the front—often to the lonesome front—and to say so; he has almost uniformly the sweet satisfaction that Emerson says it takes reformers generally twenty years to get, namely, of seeing many, if not most, men come around to him later. Utterly free from sensation, this worthy occupant of Bryant's chair so guides his editorial page that it is doubtful if any other journal to-day has greater or even equal weight with the ablest men in charge either of large private affairs or of the affairs of the nation.
And bodily he is splendidly equipped for hard work. No shallowness of chest; no thin legs; no suggestion of weakness anywhere. But, on the contrary, a five-foot-nine compact man, built from the ground up like a
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