incarnation of probity and kindness, of steadfast devotion to his duty
as he saw it, and to the needs of the whole human family. A tragedy in
truth it was; and yet as his body was lowered into its grave there rose
above it, invisible, unnoted, a flower of matchless beauty--the flower
of peace and love between the sections of the Union to which his life
had been a sacrifice.

The crank convention had builded wiser than it knew. That the Democratic
Party could ever have been brought to the support of Horace Greeley
for President of the United States reads even now like a page out of a
nonsense book. That his warmest support should have come from the South
seems incredible and was a priceless fact. His martyrdom shortened the
distance across the bloody chasm; his coffin very nearly filled it.
The candidacy of Charles Francis Adams or of Lyman Trumbull meant a
mathematical formula, with no solution of the problem and as certain
defeat at the end of it. His candidacy threw a flood of light and warmth
into the arena of deadly strife; it made a more equal and reasonable
division of parties possible; it put the Southern half of the country
in a position to plead its own case by showing the Northern half that
it was not wholly recalcitrant or reactionary; and it made way for real
issues of pith and moment relating to the time instead of pigments of
bellicose passion and scraps of ante-bellum controversy.

In a word Greeley did more by his death to complete the work of Lincoln
than he could have done by a triumph at the polls and the term in the
White House he so much desired. Though but sixty-one years of age, his
race was run. Of him it may be truly written that he lived a life
full of inspiration to his countrymen and died not in vain, "our later
Franklin" fittingly inscribed upon his tomb.

Chapter the Twelfth

The Ideal in Public Life--Politicians, Statesmen and Philosophers--The
Disputed Presidency in 1876--The Personality and Character of Mr.
Tilden--His Election and Exclusion by a Partisan Tribunal

I

The soul of journalism is disinterestedness. But neither as a principle
nor an asset had this been generally discovered fifty years ago. Most of
my younger life I was accused of ulterior motives of political ambition,
whereas I had seen too much of preferment not to abhor it. To me, as to
my father, office has seemed ever a badge of servitude. For a long time,
indeed, I nursed the delusions of