Such a study is most interesting. No other editor has ever given opportunity for it. Beginning his editorial labors when both the tariff and the slavery questions were quiescent, we find in the files of the New Yorker, the Jeffersonian, the Log Cabin, and the New York Tribune, in order, an expression of the growing national interest in these subjects, and a discussion of them which pictures, better than any mere recital of results can do, the building up of a public sentiment that had so far-reaching results. This is especially true of the slavery question; because Greeley was not an early Abolitionist-not an Abolitionist at all, in the technical sense. He was one of those who were content to leave the South alone with its slavery as that institution was defined in the Federal Constitution and restricted by the Missouri Compromise. But he was foremost in the ranks of those who called for the observance of that compromise, who refused to concede to the South new slave territory, and who assisted in arousing the national conscience to the pitch that made an armed attempt to save the Union in the sixties a possibility.
Why this valiant warrior stepped aside into the ranks of the timid and the compromisers when the issue was drawn, each reader
