nd to stir public feeling to its
profoundest depths before Mr. Lincoln's election became possible. He
contributed more than any other man to defeat the compromise and
settlement for which Mr. Lincoln and his chief adviser, Mr. Seward, were
anxious in the exciting, expectant Winter of 1860-61, and to precipitate
an avoidable bloody war. It was he, carrying a majority of the
Republican party with him, who kept insisting, in the early stages of
the conflict, that the emancipation of the slaves was an indispensable
element of success. Mr. Lincoln stood out and resisted, ridiculing an
emancipation proclamation as 'a bull against the comet.' Mr. Greeley
roused the Republican party by that remarkable leader signed by his name
and addressed to Mr. Lincoln, headed 'The Prayer of Twenty Millions,'
the effect of which the President tried to parry by a public letter to
the editor of the _Tribune_, written with all the dexterous ingenuity
and telling aptness of phrase of which Mr. Lincoln was so great a
master. But Mr. Greeley victoriously carried the Republican party, which
he had done more than all other men to form, with him; and within two
months after Mr. Lincoln's reply to 'The Prayer of Twenty Millions,' his
reluctance was overborne, and he was constrained to issue his celebrated
Proclamation, which committed the Government to emancipation, and staked
the success of the war on that issue. This culminating achievement, the
greatest of Mr. Greeley's life, is the most signal demonstration of his
talents. It was no sudden, random stroke. It was the effect of an
accumulated, ever-rising, widening, deepening stream of influence, which
had been gathering volume and momentum for years, and whose piling
waters at last burst through and bore down every barrier. Mr. Greeley
had long been doing all in his power to swell the tide of popular
feeling against slavery, and it was chiefly in consequence of the
tremendous force he had given to the movement that that barbarous
institution was at last swept away. It is the most extraordinary
revolution ever accomplished by a single mind with no other instrument
than a public journal.

It may be said, indeed, that Mr. Greeley had many zealous coadjutors.
But so had Luther able coadjutors in the Protestant Reformation; so had
Cromwell in the Commonwealth; so had Washington in our Revolution; so
had Cobden in the repeal of the corn laws. They are nevertheless
regarded as the leading minds in the res