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general, and perhaps more destructive, than weakness of will.

Raymond had no more sympathy with Phillips and Garrison and the rest of the abolitionist radicals of the North than with the sabre-toothed fire-eaters of South Carolina. While some other New York papers took the occasion of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry to offer the South some words of warning as to the constant danger of insurrection that was an inevitable concomitant of slavery, The Times dwelt rather on the fact that the slaves had not joined Brown's party, and called the raid itself the work of either "irresponsible anarchy or wild and reckless crime." Raymond was entirely in sympathy with the moderate attitude on slavery which was held by most thinking men at the North. He did not admire slavery; and eventually, in the letters to Yancey, which will be noticed below, he did go at some length into the difficulties and dangers which the institution might be expected eventually to bring upon any society by which it was tolerated. But he felt that slavery in the South, though objectionable on moral and political grounds, was a southern question; the great issue of the day was not slavery but the slave power in politics, and the struggle with that power was indeed an irrepressible conflict.

In the campaign of 1860 The Times was one of the leading Republican papers of the country, and though it favored Seward for the presidential nomination, from first to last it displayed a degree of confidence in Abraham Lincoln that was not universal among Republicans of the East. It may be

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