Of course hundreds of thousands of these poor creatures perished from starvation. This seemed to frighten President Greeley, and he sent a message to Congress recommending that seven hundred thousand volumes of a book of his entitled What I Know about Farming," should be devoted for the relief of the starving sufferers. This was done, and farming implements and seeds were supplied; and then the millions of wretched outcasts made an effort to till the ground. Of the result of this I will speak further on.

In the meantime the President was doing infinite harm to the country in another way. way. His handwriting was so fearfully and wonderfully bad that no living man could read it. And so when he sent his first annual message to Congress-the document was devoted wholly to the tariff and agriculturea sentence appeared which subsequently was ascertained to be, "Large cultivation of rutabagas and beans is the only hope of the American nation, I am sure." The printers, not being able to interpret this, put it in the following form, in which it went to the world: The Czar of Russsia could'nt keep clean if he washed himself with the whole Atlantic ocean once a day!" This perversion of the message was immediately telegraphed to Russia by the Russian Minister, and the Czar was so indignant that he immediately declared war.

Just at this time President Greeley undertook to write some letters to Prince Bismark upon the subject of potato rot, and, after giving his singular views at great length, he concluded with the statement that if the Emperor William said that subsoil plowing was not good in light soil, or that guano was better than bone-dust, he was a liar, a villain and a slave!' Of course the Emperor immediately declared war, and became an ally of Russia and England, against which latter country Mr. Greeley had actually begun hostilities already, because the Queen, in her speech from the throne, had declared the Tribune's advocacy of a tariff on pig iron incendiary, and calculated to disturb the peace of nations.

Unhappily, this was not the full measure of our disasters. The President had sent to the Emperor of Austria a copy of his book, 'What I Know," etc., with his autograph upon a fly-leaf. The Emperor mistook the signature for a carricature of the Austrian eagle, and he readily joined in a war against the United States while France was provoked to the same act by the fact that when the French minister came to call on Mr. Greeley, to present his credentials, the President, who was writing an editorial at the time, not comprehending the French language, mistook the Ambassador for a beggar, and without looking up handed him a quarter and an order for a clean shirt, and said to him, ‘Go West, young man-go West.'

So all these nations joined in making war upon the United States. They swooped down upon our coasts and landed without opposition, for those exposed portions of our unhappy country were absolutely deserted. The President was afraid to call away the army from Kansas at first, for fear the outraged people upon the plains would come East in spite of him. But at last

he did summon the army to his aid, and it moved to meet the enemy. It was too late. Before the troops reached Cincinnati the foreigners had seized Washington and all the country east of the Ohio, and had hung the President, the Cabinet, and every member of Congress. The army disbanded in alarm, and the invaders removed to the far West, where they found the population dying of starvation because they had followed the advice of Greeley's book, to 'Try, for your first crop, to raise limes; and don't plant more than a bushel of quicklime in a hill?' Of course, these wretched people were at the mercy of the enemy, who-to his credit be it said—treated them kindly, fed them, and brought them back to their old homes.

"You know what followed-how Prince Frederick William of Prussia ascended the American throne, and the other humiliations that ensued. It was a fearful blow to Republicanism—a blow from which it will never recover. It made us, who were freemen, a nation of slaves. It was all the result of our blind confidence in a misguided old man, who thought himself a philosopher, but who was actually a fool. May heaven preserve you, my children, from the remorse I feel when I remember that I voted for that bucolic old editor."

CHAPTER XXV.

IS HE FIT?

Traits of Horace Greeley's Character-For what his Genius Fits him-For what it Does Not-How an Honest Man Can Do Dishonest Acts-Some Faults and How they Might be Cured-Can the Country Afford it ?—How his One-Term Theory Kills His Own Chances-H. G., his Plea at the Jubilee-H. G. as an Administrator-Eleven Specific Points-Wm. C. Bryant's Portraiture of Greeley.

It is to be hoped that no reader has received an impression from the preceding chapters, or from any other source, that Horace Greeley is a man destitute of admirable personal qualities. He certainly has several such. In the first place, he is a man of genius-genius in a certain direction, to which his success as an agitator and reformer, and as a writer for the patriotic American public, bears sufficient testimony. His best trait—indeed the best trait which any man, public or private, can have, is honesty: or rather, we must say in this particular case, the intention to be honest; and this intention is always executed except where it is overborne by his strong and impetuous prejudices, or by his inordinate personal vanity, or by some other motive, in itself not dishonorable, but which warps the man's conscience, unconsciously to himself.

This paradox often occurs in men of irregular

education, of uncontrolled impulse, and of a predisposition to theorizing and to making all events and actions square themselves by their theories. we have already seen this illustrated in the case of Charles Sumner, asserting what was not true with regard to Stanton, and denying what was true with regard to himself. It rarely appears in Mr. Greeley's history, except in connection with public affairs-as in the case of the Niagara peace negotiations, wherein he not only misrepresented Lincoln, and caused him to be misrepresented still more widely by the quasi Rebel commissioners, but misrepresented his own status to the public through the Tribune. On the morning of the 22d of July, 1864, five days after his fiasco at the Clifton House, he said, at the head of his editorial columns :

"Of course all reports that the writer has been engaged in proposing, or receiving or discussing hypothetical terms or basis of peace, whether with accredited agents of the Richmond authorities or others, are utterly mistaken,"

On the same day he published those portions of the correspondence which accuse Lincoln of prevaricating.

Having in youth few really vicious impulses, and none, perhaps, which manifested themselves to his parents, Mr. Greeley never felt obliged to put forth effort to control his impulses; hence it is, doubtless, that we find him yielding so readily to them throughout his career.

There is no doubt that a term of public service in an office of dignity and responsibility, would be beneficial to him-would make him less flighty, less

fidgety, less ready to go into a passion and speak hard words, less ready to yield to the importunities of friends without reference to the character of those friends, less ready to adopt every new vagary which presents itself to him of a summer morning in a plausible aspect. In short, his constitutional radicalism might be toned down into a partial conservatism by a term of office as chief magistrate of the nation. But can the nation afford to take him as a leader, just for the training it would give him, when it has others already trained? And especially when there is great risk that the qualities which now unfit the man for the place might, by the force of circumstances extremely liable to occur, be exaggerated, rather than cured by the process? Even if it were not for this risk, a very strong argument against trying Greeley in the Presidency would be furnished by his own rule of One Term, which would muster him out of service before he had become well fitted for his duties.

Mr. Greeley himself argues* that, since he has been a good journalist, he may be reasonably expected to make a good President; but this is a most palpable non sequitur. In the first place, he is not a good journalistt-he is simply an able writer and speaker, a bold innovator and a doughty disputant upon mooted points of politics, who can command the ear of the public, and whose style is peculiarly adapted to the needs of the newspaper "leader” or

*Speech at the Boston Jubilee, July 3, 1872.

+Mr. Parton concurs in this view. See Biography, p. 205.