the visiting committees. I thus saw extreme destitution more closely than I had ever before observed it and was enabled to scan its repulsive features intelligently. I saw two families, including six or eight children, burrowing in one cellar under a stable,—a prey to famine on the one hand, and to vermin and cutaneous maladies on the other, with sickness adding its horrors to those of a polluted atmosphere and a wintry temperature. I saw men who each, somehow, supported his family on an income of $5 a week or less, yet who cheerfully gave something to mitigate the suffering of those who were really poor. I saw three widows, with as many children, living in an attic on the profits of an apple stand which yielded less than $3 a week, and the landlord came in for a full third of that. But worst to bear of all was the pitiful plea of stout, resolute, single young men and women: "We do not want alms; we are not beggars; we hate to sit here day by day, idle and useless; help us to work,—we want no other help; why is it that we have nothing to do?"[1]
Greeley's socialistic beliefs led to a warm debate with his erstwhile protégé, Henry J. Raymond, when the latter, leaving Greeley and the Tribune, went to work for James Watson Webb on the Courier and Enquirer. This was an additional reason for the coolness, which developed into actual enmity, between the two.
It was, however, by his vigorous championship of the Free Soil party and by the whole-souled manner in which he later threw himself into the Republican party, that Greeley achieved his greatest fame before the war. The Democratic party was dominated by the South; the Whigs were a weak opposition, led mainly by men who did not have the courage of their convictions and who did not sense the struggle that was coming. The Free Soil party
- ↑ Greeley, Busy Life, 145.
