HORACE GREELEY, the first great journalist of the United States, may be taken as a type of the American newspaper essayists whose “editorials” did so much to direct events during the first half of the nineteenth century. Without the smoothness of his pupil, Charles A. Dana, he had an extraordinary force of direct statement, due rather to his earnestness than to any study of the graces of style. The selections here given represent his manner both as an editorial essayist and as a correspondent. He was born at Amherst, New Hampshire, February 3d, 1811. His early education was largely an incident of his work at the printer’s case. His whole life was devoted to newspaper work in one way or another. In New York city, where he began his newspaper career in 1831, he founded or edited successively the Morning Post (on a cash capital of $150), the New Yorker, the Jeffersonian, the Log Cabin, and in 1841 the Tribune. He served a term in Congress (1848–49) and was a candidate for President against Grant in 1872, but his greatest successes in life were achieved always in his own field of journalism rather than in politics. In journalism he stood for the power of a strong individual conscience, asserting rectitude as the first law of good business and the supreme law of “good politics.” He may have been mistaken in many things, but his whole life vindicates him as an exponent of this idea. He died November 29th, 1872, a victim of the overstrain of the presidential campaign of that year.