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278 though affecting to be neutral, were really inclined to be Democratic.

From the very beginning Greeley established the fact that he was ready to fight for his place in the newspaper world; he had as his assistant Henry J. Raymond, of whom we shall speak later, and he very quickly attracted to himself and his paper all those who had reform causes at heart; all, indeed, who were in sympathy with the oppressed. Margaret Fuller was not only a contributor to the Tribune, but lived with Mr. and Mrs. Greeley at their country home on Forty-ninth Street. In this way he became, with her, a devoted champion of the emancipation of women and a believer in the fullest recognition of social and political equality with "the rougher sex."

The same spirit led him to open his columns to the socialists of that day. Fourier was then the rage among the intellectuals, due in great measure to the efforts of Alfred Brisbane, who presented Fourier's ideas to the public in a series of articles, which ran for two or three years in the Tribune.

Greeley attributed his own conversion to Fourierism to the fearful conditions that he saw in the winter of 1837-38, when destitution and suffering pervaded the city.

"I lived that winter," he says, "in the Sixth Ward,—then, as now, eminent for filth, squalor, rags, dissipation, want, and misery. A public meeting of its citizens was duly held early in December and an organization formed thereat, by which committees were appointed to canvass the ward from house to house, collect funds from those who could and would spare anything, ascertain the nature and extent of the existing destitution, and devise ways and means for its systematic relief. Very poor myself, I could give no money, or but a mite; so I gave time instead, and served, through several days, on one of