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own energy was tireless, his editorial contributions averaging three columns a day. There was no valuable news that he was afraid to print, nothing evil in his view that he was afraid to combat.
The transcendentalists of the Boston Dial, to which Emerson and Margaret Fuller contributed, had a hearing in his columns, and the doings of a Millerite convention found publication.
Greeley himself reported a celebrated trial at Utica, sending in from four to nine columns a day. He aroused a warm discussion by characterizing “the whole moral atmosphere of the theater” as “unwholesome,” and refusing to urge his readers to attend dramatic performances, “as we would be expected to if we were to solicit and profit by its advertising patronage.”
1 At the same time he offended the religious element by publishing advertisements of unorthodox books, and he accompanied
1 Greeley always considered the stage inimical to many of his pet reforms. He remembered a song that he heard in a theater in derision of temperance, and a ridiculing of socialism by John Brougham, and he thought some of the impersonators of Irishmen “deserving of indictment as libelers of an unlucky race.” In summing up his Dramatic Memories in his Busy Life, he said: “I judge that the wise man is he who goes but once to the theater, and keeps the impression then made on his mind fresh and clear to the close of his life” ; but he had faith in a future stage “which will exert a benign influence over the progress and destiny of our race.”
New York, D. Appleton and Company, March 1903.
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