deprived of their rights. Within two weeks he was removed from the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, and later removed from the Committee. His career was ended, and he died three years later.
Brilliant, diplomatic, forceful, Raymond's failure as a legislator was ascribed to the fact that he had not begun his congressional career until he was too old to learn what was practically a new vocation. On the other hand, he was only fortynfive years of age, and, of the men who distinguished themselves in Congress, many had made their maiden efforts at a much later time in life. James G. Blaine suggested that if, when he was elected Lieutenant-Governor, he had instead been elected to Congress, the story might have been different.
The student of journalism will see a far different reason for Raymond's failure. A journalist can never succeed unless he is fathering popular or moral causes. Weed, who made a fortune out of politics, who was for years the political boss of his state—even aspiring, under Johnson, to be the political boss of the nation,—was also a failure, despite his great wealth. He failed to appreciate the drift of public sentiment, and so lost control of the politics of New York State to so Quixotic and temperamental a figure as Greeley.
At the time when Raymond started the New York Times, there was a broad field of usefulness for the conservative journal that he had planned, but, just as Greeley ran to an extreme in his fanaticism, his individualism, and his pursuit of everything that seemed human or idealistic, so Raymond in the field of conservatism, guided by the very materialistic Weed and influenced by the disappointed Seward, ran to a narrow conception of politics and government; he was obsessed by the idea that political power could do little wrong. His mistake was that
