g owes its pre-eminence solely to this comprehensive
journal. It received from it everything except a collegiate and a
classical education,--things not to be desired, since they interfere
with the self-manufacture of man. If Greek had been in this curriculum,
its best known dictum would have been translated, "Make thyself." This
journal carried to the community that fed on it not only a complete
education in all departments of human practice and theorizing, but the
more valuable and satisfying assurance that there was nothing more to be
gleaned in the universe worth the attention of man. This panoplied its
readers in completeness. Politics, literature, arts, sciences, universal
brotherhood and sisterhood, nothing was omitted; neither the poetry of
Tennyson, nor the philosophy of Margaret Fuller; neither the virtues of
association, nor of unbolted wheat. The laws of political economy and
trade were laid down as positively and clearly as the best way to bake
beans, and the saving truth that the millennium would come, and come
only when every foot of the earth was subsoiled.

I do not say that Orson Phelps was the product of nature and the
Tri-bune: but he cannot be explained without considering these two
factors. To him Greeley was the Tri-bune, and the Tri-bune was Greeley;
and yet I think he conceived of Horace Greeley as something greater than
his newspaper, and perhaps capable of producing another journal equal
to it in another part of the universe. At any rate, so completely did
Phelps absorb this paper and this personality that he was popularly
known as "Greeley" in the region where he lived. Perhaps a fancied
resemblance of the two men in the popular mind had something to do with
this transfer of name. There is no doubt that Horace Greeley owed his
vast influence in the country to his genius, nor much doubt that he owed
his popularity in the rural districts to James Gordon Bennett; that is,
to the personality of the man which the ingenious Bennett impressed upon
the country. That he despised the conventionalities of society, and was
a sloven in his toilet, was firmly believed; and the belief endeared him
to the hearts of the people. To them "the old white coat"--an antique
garment of unrenewed immortality--was as much a subject of idolatry as
the redingote grise to the soldiers of the first Napoleon, who had seen
it by the campfires on the Po and on the Borysthenes, and believed that
he would come again in it to lea