He went to the Democratic Convention at Baltimore, just before the war, and set before the Southerners the standpoint of the North. Then he bought a daily paper--_The Times_--to explain to Chicago the standpoint of the South. He wrote editorials. He made speeches. He poured into the newspapers, day after day for two years, a large share of the profits that he derived from his Reaper. He was no more popular as an editor than as a political candidate. He was a maker, not a collector, of public opinion; and instead of pandering to the war frenzy, he opposed it,--put his newspaper squarely in its path, and held it there until the feet of the crowd had trampled it into an impossible wreck. He was so strong, so indomitable, this heir of the Covenanters, that when the war had openly begun, he strode between the North and South and labored like a Titan to bring them to a reconciliation. He actually believed that he could establish peace. He proposed a plan. Horace Greeley indorsed it, and the two men, who were throughout life the closest of comrades, undertook to bring the severed nation back to union and the paths of law. The "McCormick Plan," in a word was to call immediately two conventions--one to represent the Democrats of the North and the other the Democrats of the South. These conventions would elect delegates to a board of arbitration, which would consider the various causes of the war and arrange a just basis upon which both sides could agree to disband their armies and reëstablish peace. After the war, too, almost before the nation had finished counting its dead, it was Cyrus H. McCormick whose voice was first heard in favor of church unity. Among the many speeches and letters of his which have been preserved, the most beautifully phrased paragraph is the ending of an article that he published in 1869, protesting against the invasion of political partisanism into the religious life. "When are we to look for the return of brotherly love and Christian fellowship," he asked, "so long as those who aspire to fill the high places of the church indulge in such wrath and bitterness? Now that the great conflict of the Civil War is past, and its issues settled, religion and patriotism alike require the exercise of mutual forbearance, and the pursuit of those things which tend to peace." For the mere game of party politics Mr. McCormick cared little or nothing. It was all as irksome to him as the task of governing Geneva was to John Calvin; but he could not help himself. His political convictions were bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. They were racial traits which his forefathers and foremothers had spent at least three centuries in developing. On one occasion Dr. John Hall of New York, seeing how Mr. McCormick was worried by political obligations, said to him: "Why do you plague yourself with these uncongenial things? What glory can you hope to get from politics that will add to what you now possess as the inventor of the Reaper?"