knocked him down, he quietly got up again. In seven weeks the _Tribune_
had a circulation of 11,000. Fertile in resources, full of plans to
advertise his journal, he gained 20,000 during a single political
campaign. Later he sent carrier pigeons to Halifax to bring home special
news. When Daniel Webster was to make an important speech in Albany, he
sent a case of type up by the night boat, and when the Albany boat
reached New York the report of the speech was all ready to be locked up
for the press. When the heart sings, the hand works easily. Work for the
_Tribune_ was literally food and medicine for Greeley. His daily stint
was three or four columns, besides his correspondence, lectures and
addresses. For twenty years he had no vacation and no rest. His one
ideal was to make the _Tribune_ an accurate and trustworthy guide for
the political thinking of the common people.

What literature was to Burke, what patriotism was to Webster, what all
mankind was to Paul, that politics and political writing were to Horace
Greeley. Dr. Bacon once said of a secretary of the State Association of
Connecticut that he was "possessed of a statistical devil." And Horace
Greeley's _Tribune Almanac_ became so great a power that an envious
competitor once said that Horace Greeley was possessed of a political
devil, who helped him in his statistics on Protection. At last the
_Tribune_ became a national organ, an acknowledged power. Horace Greeley
began to make history, and in 1860 prevented Seward's nomination for the
presidency. It was Greeley's personal preference for Governor Bates of
Missouri that made possible the nomination of Abraham Lincoln.

As a reformer, Greeley was an extremist in politics. Whatever he wanted,
he wanted on the moment, and had no patience in waiting. He was as
uncompromising as Garrison, as insistent as Wendell Phillips, and as
bitter in his criticism of Lincoln for postponing emancipation as