THE ECONOMIC ANTI-SLAVERY PARTY was headed by the industrious and indomitable Horace Greeley. His claim to the feelings of humanity should never be disputed; but as a practical man who sought to solve the riddle of every-day life he placed his practical views in the foreground. As a political economist he reasoned that slave labor was degrading to free labor; that free labor was better than slave labor, and, therefore, he most earnestly desired its abolition. Wherever you turn in his writings this idea gives the edge to all his arguments concerning slavery. "But slavery," wrote Mr. Greeley, "primarily considered, has still another aspect--that of a natural relation of simplicity to cunning, of ignorance to knowledge, of weakness to power. Thomas Carlyle, before his melancholy decline and fall into devil-worship, truly observed, that the capital mistake of Rob Roy was his failure to comprehend that it was cheaper to buy the beef he required in the Grassmarket at Glasgow than to obtain it without price, by harrying the lowland farms. So the first man whoever imbibed or conceived the fatal delusion that it was more advantageous to him, or to any human being, to procure whatever his necessities or his appetites required by address and scheming than by honest work--by the unrequited rather than the fairly and faithfully recompensed toil of his fellow-preachers--was, in essence and in heart, a slave-holder, and only awaited opportunity to become one in deed and practice.... It is none the less true, however, that ancient civilization, in its various national developments, was habitually corrupted, debauched, and ultimately ruined by slavery, which rendered labor dishonorable, and divided society horizontally into a small caste of the wealthy, educated, refined, and independent, and a vast hungry, sensual, thriftless, and worthless populace; rendered impossible the preservation of republican liberty and of legalized equality, even among the nominally free. Diogenes, with his lantern, might have vainly looked, through many a long day, among the followers of Marius, or Catiline, or Caesar, for a specimen of the poor but virtuous and self-respecting Roman citizen of the days of Cincinnatus, or even of Regulus."[20]