It may be said, again, that Mr. Greeley’s efforts in this direction were aided by the tendencies of his time.  But so were Luther’s, and Cromwell’s, and Washington’s, and everybody’s who has left a great mark on his age, and accomplished things full of consequences to future generations.  The first qualification for exerting this kind of fruitful influence is for the leader to be in complete sympathy with the developing tendencies of his own epoch.  This is necessary to make him the embodiment of its spirit, the representative of its ideas, the quickener of its passions, the reviver of its courage in adverse turns of fortune, the central mind whom other advocates of the cause consult, whose action they watch in every new emergency, and whose guidance they follow because he has resolute, unflagging confidence to lead.  In the controversies in which Mr. Greeley has been behind his age, or stood against the march of progress, even he has accomplished little.  Since Henry Clay’s death, he has been the most noted and active champion of Protection; but that cause steadily declined until the war forced the government to strain every source of revenue, and since the close of the war free-trade ideas have made surprising advances in Mr. Greeley’s own political party.  On this subject he was the disciple of dead masters, and hung to the skirts of a receding cause; but in this school he acquired that dexterity in handling the weapons of controversy which proved so effective when he advanced from the position of a disciple to that of a master, and led a movement in the direction towards which the rising popular feeling was tending.  Mr. Greeley’s name will always be identified with the extirpation of negro slavery as its most distinguished, powerful, and effective advocate.

THE BRAVE JOURNALIST.

This is his valid title to distinction and lasting fame.  Instrumental to this, and the chief means of its attainment, he founded a public journal which grew, under his direction, to be a great moving force in the politics and public thought of our time.  This alone would have attested his energy and abilities; but this is secondary praise.  It is the use he made of his journal when he had created it, the moral ends to which (besides making it a vehicle of news and the discussion of ephemeral topics) he devoted it, that will give him his peculiar place in history.  If he had had no higher aim than to supply the market for current intelligence, as a great merchant supplies the market for dry-goods, he would have deserved to rank with the builders-up of other prosperous establishments by which passing contemporary wants were supplied, but would have had no claim on the remembrance of coming generations.  But he regarded his journal not primarily as a property, but as the instrument of high moral and political ends; an instrument whose great potency for good or ill he fully comprehended, and for whose salutary direction he felt a corresponding