THE MOLDER OF PUBLIC OPINION.

It was Mr. Greeley, more than any other man, who let loose the winds that lifted the waters and drove forward their foaming, tumbling billows.  Mr. Greeley had lent his hand 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 respective innovations which they championed; and by as just a title Mr. Greeley will hold the first place with posterity on the roll of emancipation.  This is the light in which he will be remembered so long as the history of our times shall be read.