MY DEAR SIR,--In God’s good time this is to be a land of real freedom, where equal rights and equal laws shall banish rebellion, treason, and riot, and all manner of kindred diabolisms. I hardly hope to live to see that day, but hope that those who may remember me, when I am gone, will believe that I earnestly tried to hasten its coming. Yours, HORACE GREELEY. To suppose, that, under any circumstances of pressure or temptation, he can fail in loyalty to the cause he has served so constantly, is an offence to reason and to decency. In his two letters of acceptance this loyalty is nobly conspicuous. Replying to the nomination at Cincinnati, he drew the wise line between “local self-government” and “centralization,” asserting the former as our true policy, “_subject_ to our solemn constitutional obligation to maintain the equal rights of all citizens,”[224]--thus placing these under national safeguard, and making them absolutely the same in all parts of the country. Replying to the nomination at Baltimore, made after the enunciation of this master principle, he announces his “hope and trust that the first century of American Independence will not close before the grand elemental truths on which its rightfulness was originally based by Jefferson and the Continental Congress of 1776 will have become the universally accepted and honored foundations of our political fabric.”[225] And thus is his great record crowned. Living so entirely in the public eye, all know his life, which speaks for him now. Who so well as himself could stand the trial? The “Tribune,” in its career of more than thirty years, speaks for him also. Those opponents who in the work of disparagement assert that he wants executive ability, I point to this journal, begun by Horace Greeley in 1841, without partner or business associate, with a cash capital of only one thousand dollars, and with but six hundred subscribers. And yet, under his individual effort, by his amazing industry and through his rare intelligence, with his determined nature animating all, the enterprise prospered, until he found himself at the head of one of the first newspapers of the world, completely organized intellectually and mechanically, with writers for every subject, with correspondents everywhere at home and abroad, and with a constantly increasing influence never surpassed in newspaper history. A President with the ability that did all this would impart new energy to the public service, impressing it with his own faithful character, and assuring, on a larger scale, a corresponding success, so that the whole country would be gainer. Again, those opponents who assert that Horace Greeley wants fidelity, or that he can be easily swayed against life-long convictions, I point to this same journal, which from the beginning, and throughout the whole course of its existence, has been an unwavering representative of the liberal cause, foremost always