The passing of the bill went almost unnoticed by the press, so engrossed were the people in war. (It was the summer of McClellan’s Virginia campaign.) A few newspapers of free-trade principles tried to make an issue of it, but without success. Mr. Greeley came out in the _Tribune_ declaring that he would not be drawn into a discussion on protection as long as the war lasted. Indeed there was room for little on the wonderful editorial page of the _Tribune_, where Horace Greeley stripped bare his agonized heart, but the war and the emancipation of the slave. Greeley, too, was satisfied enough to let protection reëstablish itself through a revenue bill, for if there was anything which he held almost as sacred as human liberty, it was the doctrine of protection to American industries. Greeley saw protection as an actual wealthproducer, and when the Morrill Bill was up in 1860, he declared: “We have as undoubting faith that this bill if passed would add at least $100,000,000 per annum to the earnings and wages of labor throughout the country as we have that the sun will rise to-morrow.” He was one of a very few men in public life whose belief was something more than an inheritance from Henry Clay. In one of his Institute talks he once told how he became a protectionist: “From early boyhood I had sat at the feet of Hezekiah Niles, Henry Clay and Walter Forward and Rollin C. Mallary, and other champions of this doctrine, and I had attained from a perusal of theirs and kindred writings and speeches a most undoubting conviction that the policy they commended was eminently calculated to impel our country swiftly and surely onward through activity and prosperity to greatness and well-assured well-being. I had studied the question dispassionately, for the journals accessible to my boyhood were mainly those of Boston, then almost if not quite unanimously hostile to protection; but the arguments they combated seemed to me far stronger than those they advanced, and I early became an earnest and ardent disciple of the schools of Niles and Carey, and could not doubt that the policy they commended was that best calculated to lead a country of vast and undeveloped resources like ours up from rude poverty and dependence to skilled efficiency, wealth, and power.” It is undoubtedly true that the mantle of the early protectionist advocates Niles and Carey fell on Horace Greeley, and that what the one did in the “Register” and the other in his pamphlets, Greeley continued in the _Tribune_.