William Alexander Linn, Horace Greeley Founder and Editor of The New York Tribune

[76] wire, appearing in the edition of November 15. During the Mexican War a pony express carried the news from New Orleans to Petersburg, Va., the nearest telegraph station, in this way delivering the New Orleans papers of March 29 at the telegraph office on February 4. The exploits of these expresses were described by the press all over the country, and all this gave the competing journals a big advertisement.

I am inclined to think that what did as much as anything to widen Greeley's reputation, and to advertise his journal in its early days, was his devotion to “isms.” One of his laudators had insisted that he had only two of these, but that assumption did him an injustice. “No other public teacher,” to quote his own words, “lives so wholly in the present as the editor; and the noblest affirmations of unpopular truth — the most self-sacrificing defiance of a base and selfish public sentiment that regards only the most sordid ends, and values every utterance solely as it tends to preserve quiet and contentment, while the dollars fall jingling into the merchants' drawer, the land-jobbers' vault, and the miser's bag-can but be noted in their day, and with their day be forgotten.” Herein we get Greeley's idea of “isms,” a conception not