Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/317

Rh possible, stay there quite a time,—long enough to cool my fevered brain and renovate my overtasked energies. All I ask is that we shall be counted even on the morning after the first Tuesday in February, as aforesaid, and that I may thereafter take such course as seems best without reference to the past."

Seward's inability to see the political mistake that had been made is shown by the off-hand manner with which, in a note to Weed, he refers to this extraordinary letter, suggests that something be done for poor Greeley and asks if there is a place on the Board of Regents that could be made for him, as if history could be patched up with a place on the Board of Regents!

In the new Republican party that was formed Greeley had, over Seward and Weed, the advantage that he had been an ardent believer in the movement, and had been in frequent consultation with, and had greatly encouraged those who were for the new party, and was said to have been the one who suggested the name, "Republican." On the other hand, Seward and Weed had never given the Republican movement, in the West and in New England, a word of encouragement in 1854,—a mistake that cost them dearly before many years had passed.

When Seward made his great speech favoring the immediate admission of Kansas, and defending the settlers in maintaining their struggle for admission as a free state, Greeley enthusiastically endorsed it as "unsurpassed in its political philosophy." The day that it was printed in the weekly Tribune, the circulation rose to 162,000 copies.

It was this friendliness on Greeley's part when he and they were at one on a matter of principle, that led Seward