Edwin Lawrence Godkin (1831-1902) was an American publicist. He was born in Moyne, county Wicklow, Ireland. He studied law in New York City, was admitted to the bar in 1859, travelled in Europe in 1860-1862, wrote for the London News and the New York Times in 1862-1865, and in 1865 founded in New York City The Nation, a weekly projected by him long before, for which Charles Eliot Norton gained friends in Boston and James Miller McKim in Philadelphia, and which Godkin edited until the end of the year 1899. In 1881 he sold The Nation to the New York Evening Post, and became an associate editor of the Post, of which he was editor-in-chief in 1883- 1899, succeeding Carl Schurz. Godkin shaped the lofty and independent policy of the Post and The Nation, which had a small but influential and intellectual class of readers. He published A History of Hungary, A.D. 300- 1850 (1856), Government (1871, in the American Science Series), Reflections and Comments, 1865-1895 (1895), Problems of Modern Democracy (1896) and Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy (1898).