a fiery youth, frank, open, trusting, a believer in the possibility of realizing an ideal society upon earth ... the Dana of the seventies and eighties and nineties [was] an aging cynic.... [H]e fought civil service reform tooth and nail.... He believed in expanding the American republic by wholesale land-grabbing.... He was opposed to the main aims of the labor movement.... Half the time he and the Sun were on the side of the worst politicians in Tammany, and against the reform movements in city government." Dana made the Sun a Democratic newspaper, independent and outspoken in the expression of its opinions respecting the affairs of either party. His criticisms of civil maladministration during General Grant's terms as president led to a notable attempt on the part of that administration, in July 1873, to take him from New York on a charge of libel, to be tried without a jury in a Washington police court. Application was made to the United States District Court in New York for a warrant of removal, but in a memorable decision Judge Samuel Blatchford, later a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, refused the warrant, holding the proposed form of trial to be unconstitutional. Perhaps to a greater extent than in the case of any other conspicuous journalist, Dana's personality was identified in the public mind with the newspaper that he edited. In 1876, the Sun favored Samuel J. Tilden, the Democratic candidate for the presidency, opposed the Electoral Commission, and continually referred to Rutherford B. Hayes as the "fraud president". In 1884 it supported Benjamin Butler, the candidate of Greenback-Labor and Anti-Monopolist parties, for the presidency, and opposed James G. Blaine (Republican) and even more bitterly Grover Cleveland (Democrat). Circulation peaked about 150,000, and the advent of Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World cut deeply into the Sun's circulation. Dana was a very old-fashioned publisher who distrusted the Linotype and relied not on advertising but on the two-cent cover price for his funding. In 1888 it supported Cleveland and opposed Benjamin Harrison, although it had bitterly criticized Cleveland's first administration, and was to criticize nearly every detail of his second, with the exception of Federal interference in the Pullman strike of 1894; and in 1896, on the free silver issue, it opposed William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic candidate for the presidency. In a word, the Sun had abandoned its