Horace White

Horace White and Seth Low, each eminent for ability, virtue, and public service, died on successive days. The public press has given the admirable journalistic career of the former. Born in New Hampshire in 1834, and moving with his parents to Wisconsin, he was at twenty years of age the city editor of the Chicago Evening Journal. He took part in the Kansas Free State movement, and would have settled in Kansas had he not been given a position on the Chicago Tribune, of which he later became the editor and chief proprietor. Before that, as the close friend of Abraham Lincoln, he had reported the debates with Douglas. Through the Civil War, he was the Tribune’s Washington correspondent, and performed other useful functions at that distracted center of political affairs. In 1881, at the request of Henry Villard, he became an associate editor of the Evening Post, with Carl Schurz and E. L. Godkin,, and, upon Mr. Godkin’s retirement in 1899, editor-in-chief. He himself retired in 1903. Six years later he was chairman of Governor Hughes’s Commission on Speculation and Securities. He was the author of Money and Banking Illustrated by American History, and of other economic books. Yet, as a saving counterpoise, he remained keenly interested in the old human classics, and translated Appian’s Roman History. The unfailing wisdom of his financial writing rendered good service to the country through a period marked by many a financial folly. His character was as just and true as his writings were sound and perspicacious.

Henry Osborn Taylor
1917 Century Association Yearbook