EDITORIALS OF THE HERALD AND THE POST.

593

was mourning over the loss of one of its greatest citizens. There was nothing in the demonstration fitted to remind one of the more pompous funerals of the Old World, when some prince or warrior or illustrious statesman is borne to his final home. It was not such a funeral as London gave some years ago to the Duke of Wellington. It was quiet and modest as contrasted with that which we gave to our own Lincoln. There was no ostentatious turn-out on the part of the societies; there was no grand · military display, and from the church to the grave "not a drum was heard, not a funeral note." In silence the procession moved; with silence the crowds looked on, and in silence, as was most becoming, the great journalist was laid in his grave. The silence, however, did not indicate the absence of sympathy, but the reverse, for sorrowful looks and wet eyes, in numerous instances, testified to the existence of feelings which noisy demonstrations could not express. It was abundantly manifest yesterday in the church, on the streets, and at the grave that many felt that not only was a good and a true man taken away from the midst of them, but that they individually had lost a friend. Goodness," said Dr. Chapin yesterday, when speaking over the remains of the dead, "goodness is better than greatness. It brings us nearer to God." Few will refuse to admit that, whatever the faults of Horace Greeley, he had in him many of the elements of a truly good man. He was a man of the people, and the people's cause he never abandoned. His sympathies were with the oppressed in all lands, and with pen and purse he was ever ready to help them. The grave has now closed over his mortal remains; his spirit is with its God. Let his weaknesses and shortcomings, if he had such, be forgotten, and let his great outstanding merits as a man and as a journalist be remembered and held up as an example.

The Evening Post, which had had more discussions with The Tribune than any other Republican journal, The Times only excepted, remarked:

The honours shown his remains, then, are honours done to his profession; but they are also an evidence of the consideration in which he was himself held. They prove that whatever opinions we may have individually formed of the intellectual or personal merits of the subject of them, the great body of the people discovered in him grounds for admiration, attachment, and gratitude. They saw in his efforts to enlighten and guide the sentiments of his fellows something more than a paltry pursuit of wealth or a vain ambition of power and fame. They saw in them an earnest desire to do good, to help forward the better interests of the community, and to maintain that spirit of justice and freedom which in our hot and reckless enterprises we are apt to forget, but which constitutes the very bond and cement, as it does the life and glory, of civilized society.

With Mr. Greeley's political and philosophical views of things, we were not in entire accord; his manner of presenting his convictions did not

always meet our approval; but for some objects, and these among the most momentous that ever divided the nation, we laboured long in common, and we can bear witness to the zeal, the fearlessness, and the vigour with which he battled for the right. In the slow but intense and bitter controversy against Slavery, which has filled our history for nearly fifty years, we found him always a powerful coadjutor, and we doubt whether any single instrument used against the gigantic wrong was more effective in the work of its gradual overthrow than the press which he managed with so much courage and determination. So far as the history of that conflict has been written, and so far as it is yet to be written, one of the most prominent places must be given to the sturdy, unflinching, and persistent assaults of The Tribune newspaper. The more zealous Abolitionists were sometimes apt to criticise the peculiar methods of its warfare, but none, we think, will at this day deny the efficiency of its services.

Other journals of New-York expressed feelings of the kindliest admiration for Mr. Greeley, and spoke of his death as a loss to mankind. The Tribune gave a very great proportion of its space to an account of the funeral. "If we had a Westminster Abbey," it said, in conclusion of a long and beautiful editorial, "our friend would yesterday have been laid therein. And yet he would not have desired that stately isolation. For he believed that more and more, as the years go on, the sentiment of religion would refuse to be entombed in cathedrals and to consecrate here and there a building. To him all places were sacred wherein a great humanity had followed after the Highest. And he would have chosen the equal sky for his canopy and the generous earth for his bed, because the same rest and shelter are free to all the race. We can afford to leave him in his unmarked grave. Time and Death, those kindly counsellors, have undertaken his vindication who in life would never stoop to vindicate himself, and to them we may safely trust his fame.

"For Humanity sweeps onward. Where to-day the martyr stands,

On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands,

And the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe returns

To gather up the scattered ashes into History's golden urns '"

The Tribune also published an open letter from Mr. Sinclair Tousey to the President:

A NATIONAL FUNERAL.

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TO PRESIDENT GRANT-Sir: I trust that I shall not be charged with presumption in addressing you on the subject of this letter. I want to thank you, not for any favour bestowed on my friends, or shown to me. Thanks for such things are as common as the benefits they confer. 1 desire to thank you for something greater and better than these; for something much beyond the ordinary practice of high official life. I desire to thank you for the respect shown by you to Mr. Greeley on his death-bed, and for the great respect you paid his character and memory by your attendance on his funeral. It was a great compliment for the head of a great nation to decline attendance on an official festivity while a private citizen was dying, a citizen who had no claims on the sympathy of the official, either of blood or close friendship. It was a much greater compliment when that Executive laid aside the pressing duties of his great office, and, making a night journey of hundreds of miles at an inclement season, took the place of a private person, among the thousands gathered together to pay the last tribute of respect that the living can pay the dead. For your remembrance of Mr. Greeley, dying; for your attendance at his funeral; for the tearful attention you paid to the sad ceremonies of that occasion, Mr. President, I thank you with all earnestness. I am very sure that in doing so I but echo the sentiments of hundreds of thousands of your fellow-citizens, whose views of public affairs led them and myself to support, in the late canvass, the man to whom you have shown such high respect. By these acts you have removed prejudices, changed opponents into friends, and shown the world that great official life need not deaden the better instincts of our common humanity. By these acts you have taught the nations that Americans never forget what is due to the character of their great citizens, and that the passions of an exciting political contest never destroy the respect that American partisan opponents have for the good lives of good men.

I thank you, Mr. President, and pray that a long and happy life may await you. And when it shall please the Great Ruler to send the angel of Death to call you hence, may your passage to the tomb be made smooth by the affections of kind friends, and the grave close over you with the heartfelt prayers of your countrymen for your eternal rest. Very respectfully, your friend,

NEW-YORK, Dec. 6, 1872.

SINCLAIR TOUSEY.

But the funeral of Horace Greeley was not confined to New-York. It was a national ceremony; nay, it was a national reality. The people everywhere put on a real sorrow. Those who had been the most earnest in their opposition to him as a candidate for the Chief Magistrate no less sincerely than Mr. Tousey thanked the President for his act of beautiful kindness in attending the funeral, in unfriendly criticism of which,

there was but one voice raised, so far as I recollect, in all the land, and that was the voice of Mr. William Lloyd Garrison.

"And the people-ah, the people

They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,

And who tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,

Fell a glory in so rolling

On the human heart a stone

They are neither man nor woman

They are neither brute nor human-
They are Ghouls."

1

With this exception, the whole people may be said to have profoundly sorrowed at the death of Horace Greeley, and to have wept over his grave. Thus it was with the National Congress, with State Legislatures, with the Electoral College, with municipal bodies, in all parts of the republic, with the press and pulpit. If not by his life, by his death he accomplished a sublime work of pacification; and since he began his long rest in Greenwood, there can never again be the bitterness, the injustice of personal assault in political contests, which prevailed before. This injustice was in his case made so palpable to all minds by the fact of his death occurring so soon after the political contest of the year, whereby most men were led to think honestly of his life and character, that it can never more be repeated to anything like the extent to which it had before obtained. If there is any such instance in history, where any human being has so constantly served his countrymen throughout life and whose death was also a signal benefit to them, I do not recall it.

'For many public expressions upon the life and character of Mr. Greeley see Appendix "E." near the end of this volume.

CHAPTER XXXI.

TO SUM THE WHOLE-THE CLOSE OF ALL.

Review of the Private Life and Public Services of Mr. Greeley - Estimate of His Genius - His Character-The Services He Rendered His Country and Mankind — A Friend of the Labouring Man, One of the People, a Great, a Good, and an Honest Man, though not a Perfect Character.

I HAVE thus endeavoured to portray the private life and public services of Horace Greeley, exercising my best judgment in the selection from the vast amount of material at command those facts, writings, utterances which would appear the most correctly and fully to place his character and genius before the general reader. For connected accounts of his life I have been greatly and constantly indebted to the biography by Mr. James Parton and to the "Recollections of a Busy Life" by Mr. Greeley himself. Other materials I have found in history; the lives of cotemporaries with whom Mr. Greeley was associated in personal or political friendship, and of those who opposed him; in the public journals of the times; in many letters; in the statements of acquaintances; in my own observation of recent events. I need hardly say that the Life of Horace Greeley which shall do complete and full justice to his benignant character, his miriad-minded genius, the services he rendered his countrymen and mankind by his long and unparalleled labours in their behoof, cannot now be written. Time must eradicate the asperities, the misapprehensions, the misrepresentations which grew out of the discussions in which he engaged, the reforms and revolutions which he did so much to promote. When sufficient time shall have elapsed for such a work to be accomplished, and to be received by the public, with honest, unbiassed judgment, and the work itself shall have been written with truthfulness, and skill, and fullness, then, and, perhaps not till then, will the wonderful life, character,