1 7 LINCOLN ROOM UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY MEMORIAL the Class of 1901 founded by HARLAN HOYT HORNER and HENRIETTA CALHOUN HORNER Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://www.archive.org/details/worldslincolnOOdrin THE WORLD'S LINCOLN By JOHN DRINKWATER NEW YORK THE BOWLING GREEN PRESS I928 COPYRIGHT I928 BY THE BOWLING GREEN PRESS, INC. PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. / I w* . ' >*--» MS »> THE WORLD'S LINCOLN at* d* CIENTIFIC accuracy is, & right- ly, dear to the heart of the mod- ern historian; and yet, the more we study history, the more diffi- cult of attainment does it seem to be. When all the archives have been ransacked, and every document scrutinised to the last flourish of a letter, how little, we realise, is known of the literal fads after all, how much of high significance in chara&er and event has escaped the most patient investigation. No tale of things that actually came to pass on earth is ever even half told, and the stoutest record would seem hardly more than a marginal note if we knew all. And, scanty as our information maybe, how sel- dom are we sure that even so little is indisputable. Figures of distant ages, greatly notable in their day, and freely noted by the chroniclers, survive mostly i 5 > in very doubtful fidelity to the originals, and figures notable for all time are often indistind almost to the point of invisibility. Would it not seem to have been inconceivable that the supreme man of the modern world, Shakespeare, should within three hundred years of his death have been so completely effaced from biographical memory that the new and author- itative dating of any single moment in his life would make a scholar's reputation; that, indeed, there is acri- monious debate as to whether he ever existed at all? It may well be that we are content to know no more of him than is revealed by his work, but it is none the less a miracle that Shakespeare the man has become no more than a spedral surmise. But even where the witnesses have been diligent, more than much remains in obscurity. Boswell on Johnson and Pepys on himself tell us a great deal that is significant, but their copious notes leave untold more than they tell. It must inevitably be so. The full story of a man's life would take as long to read as to live, and twenty times as long to write. The amplest compilation of fads, say Lockhart on Scott or Moore on Byron, amounts at last to a slight and more or less fortuitous seledion. Far from being regrettable, this is fortunate; but it is a fad. If, however, it is remarkable that our knowledge i 6 > of a poet who lived three hundred years ago should be sparse and unreliable, it is far more so that there should be doubt and difficulty about the lives of men who were figures of close public attention within liv- ing memory. But such doubt and difficulty there are. Popular conceptions of great men who a generation ago were the staple of daily news, founded apparent- ly on secure evidence, are continually being chal- lenged, sometimes wantonly, sometimes in good faith. The virtues of common report were, it seems, but the cloak of-sad infirmities after all; the loyalty was carefully disposed by self-interest; the chivalry was lewd at heart; the fortitude was arrogance; and the vision was false. All of which may be true, or it may not. The challenge, no doubt, is plausibly sup- ported; documents can be made to support anything if you have enough of them to choose from. Nelson possibly was a coward, and someone may have evi- dence up his sleeve to prove it. But the important thing is not the assurance that sooner or later truth will out, but that there comes a time when certain convidions are so firmly established that they be- come proof against any spe&acular revelations, be- come, that is y the potent truth itself, no matter what excavation of fads may threaten it. If a seled com- mittee of the High Courts of the world were to de- i 7 > cide on an impartial examination of the evidence that Nelson was a coward, we should laugh in their faces. ♦ No public man in the western world during the past seventy years or so has been more minutely ob- served than Abraham Lincoln. History hardly af- fords so striking an instance of a man taking on an epic significance while the daily habit of his life is still a matter of familiar recolle&ion. And yet already the story of Lincoln is the subjed of historical disputa- tion. Not only is he the great American, the beloved symbol in which a nation of over a hundred million people sees itself exalted ; he is also accepted by the world, or by the western world at any rate, as a states- man by whom office was dignified with an almost unexampled splendour of chara&er. Such a one, it might have been supposed, would have been present- ed to us with absolute authority, with an assurance of mood and feature that none could call in question. A man so deeply contemplated and so devoutly es- teemed must surely stand before us at least precisely for what he is y with no hesitancy of countenance or obscured definition. The more so when, as with Lin- coln, the records of all kinds are so plentiful and elab- orate. Photographers, draughtsmen, diarists, biog- raphers official and unofficial, state reporters, poets, i 8 > novelists, historians, generals and cabinet ministers, from all these we have a vast accumulation of testi- mony as to the very feature and character of Lincoln. And the testimony is supplemented by an a&ive pop- ular tradition based largely on personal conta&s. The man who has already taken his place among the uni- versal figures was the friend of men still living, and at the distance of a single generation is in intimate asso- ciation with, I suppose, hundreds of American fami- lies. I have remarked elsewhere on the emotion with which a stranger may thus find himself within a step of the a&ual presence of a hero almost fabulous in stature, of Mr. Lincoln, as he still is in familiar con- versation. I myself have sat talking with his son in a room overlooking the Potomac, the river that was the material token of a division that went near to breaking the father's heart. In my copy of a book called 'Personal Recolle&ions of Abraham Lincoln' there is written the following inscription: 'The Au- thor, in his 83rd autumn, with tender, grateful, rev- erent memories, writes these lines for John Drink- water with the hand that often clasped Abraham Lin- coln's. Henry B. Rankin, Springfield, Illinois, O&ober 20th, 1 9 1 9/ Mr. Rankin was in Herndon's law office at Springfield when Lincoln was a partner. In North Dakota I met an old man, physically & mentally alert, { 9 } who had been one of Lincoln's bodyguard for the two years preceding the assassination at Ford's Theatre; his lifelong regret was that he had been away on leave on the fatal evening, when who knows but what he might have given a different turn to American his- tory. And these experiences are common in the land where so short a time ago Lincoln came and went with all the frank accessibility of a democratic socie- ty. The evidence by which we know him is volumi- nous, precise, and vivid. From that evidence a figure has been created that has seized the imagination of mankind, and it is beyond all cavil a figure of truth. And yet the truth, this truth so commanding that it can never now be obliterated from the consciousness of our race, is at not rare intervals contested by eager investigators who hope by a myopic concentration on insignificant fads to discredit a larger verity than they know. Before considering what this verity is } let us for a moment see how these misguided enthusi- asts can vex themselves. Now and again I receive a pamphlet of Historical 7<[otes by the courtesy of a Georgian lady who com- piles them. Miss Rutherford is a very industrious stu- dent, fearless in her zeal, and genuinely convinced of the justice of her cause. Which is to show that Abra- i io> ham Lincoln, far from being the fine fellow that we take him to be, was on the whole a pretty considera- ble humbug. Miss Rutherford is not the vi&im of ir- responsible prejudices; she is a patient gleaner of evi- dence, cherishing over-duly perhaps what should by now be a faded animosity, but reinforcing her con- clusions scrap by scrap, as tremulously persuaded as a Baconian or a Flat-Earthist. I should not presume to argue with Miss Rutherford; I susped that in any case argument is a region beyond which she has ad- vanced. And, further, I honestly resped the spirit with which she labours a forlorn hope. For it is that. She will never make the world believe that Lincoln was a humbug. The world has by this time elaborated its own truth about Lincoln, and this truth will never be made to square with Miss Rutherford's theories. I seled Historical J horizons that have gone to the making of a wo rid -sto- ry. 'Eater and drinker/ Mr. Carl Sandburg calls him, 'with a swagger of a pi&ure-book swashbuckler out of a pirate story, but a personal loyalty of tried fighting quality/ The moods in which Lincoln had no use for him, when he was withdrawn into speculation that his vivid young companion — Lamon was Lincoln's jun- ior by nineteen years — could not share, would read- ily be accounted to vanity, spiritual gloom, some- thing formidable even to the point of ' vindi&iveness and cruelty/ Seward was an accomplished gentleman, who once he had tried a fall with his chief served him loyally as Secretary of State, but there was always the lurking disappointment that not he but an uncouth small-town man from the obscure west was Presi- dent. He behaved, once he had pulled himself togeth- er, very well about it, but it is no matter for surprise that a tell-tale word should now and then slip out in private talk or correspondence, or even in notes made for future use. So that Miss Rutherford's witnesses, even in her own court, might be hard enough pressed incross-examination.The significant thing, however, is that it is from these very sources, and from others of the same nature, that the Lincoln of common ac- ceptance has been evolved. Herndon & Lamon and Seward and the rest of them may no doubt in care- £ 16 J fully seledled detail be quoted to any purpose, but if we take their testimony without selection, as we ought, we find that the only purpose that it can by any means be made to serve is utterly removed from Miss Rutherford's. The world has made its own fig- ure of Lincoln, as it does of every great man. In do- ing this it may have disregarded or been unaware of aspeds that such scrutiny as Miss Rutherford's may discover, but this is of no consequence. In literal fad Lincoln was doubtless as far short of perfection as other men, but the blemishes that he had in com- mon with his fellows do not concern us. Intelledual preciosity sometimes pretends that candour desires to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about its heroes. I dissent. The peccadillos and infirmities of the great may make entertaining and harmless gossip; it may even be amusing to some to know that Dr. Johnson affeded dirty linen. But dirty linen on Dr. Johnson is of no more interest than it is elsewhere, and to see some profound signi- ficance in his choice is to see what isn't there. The Dr. Johnson that matters does not include the dirty lin- en, & to insist upon it in the name of truth is in that name to make oneself a prig. We all know that in Lincoln's nature there must have been furtive little corruptions, since he was human. But we can dis- i 17 > pense with information on that score, it being so much more readily to hand in ourselves if we want it. But there was something in Lincoln also that is never readily to hand, that is manifested only at long inter- vals in the affairs of men, something that was very well known to Herndon, Lamon, Seward and the others, something that from their records is now firmly fixed in the world's mind forever. Not from their records only, for while the figure that we know may take no account of trivialities that being true were yet of no advantage to the truth that matters, it is none the less founded on reality. And that reality comes to us by reports that were conceived not fan- tastically, but under the discipline of the original him- self. It is important to remember this. The figure that we know may not coincide in all respeds with the or- iginal of literal fad, but it has been fashioned from re- ports, written and oral, upon which that original had on the whole impressed itself faithfully. If, as we say, Miss Rutherford's witnesses & others had said in the main the sort of thing about Lincoln that she seleds for her purpose, we should be justified in supposing him to have been little better than poor white trash. But in that case our universal figure could never have come into being.The fad is y however, that the witnes- ses did not say this sort of thing in the main; they said it c[i8> exceptionally. What they said in the main was some- thing as far removed from this sort of thing as possi- ble. And for saying it their authority was Lincoln. In other words, the veritable Lincoln was himself the chief collaborator in the Lincoln that the world now accepts. We may not know everything, but we know all that we need to know, and we are confident that what we know is truth. And we are not enlightened by learning that Lincoln too could stumble. We did not suppose that it could have been otherwise. But the Lincoln who means so much to us is notable for his firm gait. Let us see who this Lincoln is. The publication of Mr. Carl Sandburgs Prairie Tears has, I think, for the first time given Lincoln his full epic stature. Not quite this, perhaps, since Mr. Sandburg calls a halt in his story, temporarily it is to be hoped, at the point where his hero was ele&ed to the Presidency. But otherwise, here is a final answer to all Miss Rutherfords. Here we see what is the effedt of an illimitably painstaking study of every available scrap of evidence upon a finely creative mind pledged to the truth. To have read this book is not merely to agree with it, but to know with certainty that a story so passionately explored and told cannot by any per- verse ingenuity be attributed to error. This indisputa- i 19 J bly is the truth. And it is truth of a loving and mag- nificent asped. Abraham Lincoln, born of pioneer parents on February 1 2th, 1 809, in a log cabin with a dirt floor at Hodgenville, Kentucky, grew up in an environ- ment at once stark and romantic. Almost from baby- hood he had to pay his shot by incessant and heavy manual labour, picking up a little elementary educa- tion at a school that was a log hut like his own home. The Lincolns had to win their living dire&ly from the earth; favourable weather meant a wooden bowl regularly filled, a bad season meant hunger and pen- ury. When he was seven years old, the boy Abraham moved with his family to Little Pigeon Creek in the newly chartered territory of Indiana, and here a foot- ing was hewn and lopped out of virgin woodland, an- other log home built, and the larder supplied with game from the countryside until the scantling farm, granted with clear title by the government at two dol- lars an acre, could begin to show its yield. The next year Abraham's mother, known to history as Nancy Hanks, died, & two years later his father had married again, bringing a widow, Sarah Bush Johnston, to pre- side over his precarious little establishment and look after his two children, whose numbers were now aug- mented by three of her own by her first marriage. Her {20} name is a fragrant memory in the story of Abraham Lincoln. As he came on to man's years and some- times fell adreaming at his work, it was she who told them to let Abe go his own way as it was like to prove as good a way as another's. Not that his dreaming made any serious inroads on his efficiency, but the frontiersmen of a new world are strangely intolerant of oddness, and to his hard-driven companions the young man who sometimes went mooning about seemed a little odd. For the rest, he was a natural born hand-worker, with a lean whipcord physique that could easily hold its own in any work or horseplay that was on hand. He could be gentle, but he was nev- er soft. The humours of that pioneer society could take a rough, sometimes even a cruel turn, and there is nothing to show that he was more squeamish than the others, though he had a sense of fair play to tem- per extravagance. Nothing of a bully, he never de- clined a challenge if he thought the odds were any- thing like level for the other fellow; & he was willing enough to interfere in any quarrel i( he thought a crooked deal was on. He began to read, walking twen- ty miles out & home again to borrow a book. Friends in distant parts of the territory encouraged him, and Aesop, Defoe & Bunyan became his friends. Also he studied arithmetic; then history. He began to be em- ployed on errands that took him far away from Tom Lincoln's cabin, trading along the Mississippi River down to New Orleans, where he saw slave-gangs be- ing dragooned in handcuffs, with consequences that were some day to be written indelibly on the history of the United States. By the time he was twenty Abra- ham Lincoln was an athlete who feared no comers, a graduate in the rigours of necessity, & more travelled than most in his station of life. He had, further, ac- quired enough book-learning to give him a name among his folk for being 'peculiarsome.' As he grew to maturity, the vast middle-west of which he was a native was teeming with the fertility of a new world. The spread of population and the as- sembling of races, the organisation of finance and the coming of the railroads, the ramifications of slavery and abolition, the drama of men and women looking westward into the wilderness and eastward to old civ- ilisations, the quarrels of politicians and the visions of statesmen, these were matters that absorbed the grown boy's mind. Then he found a copy of The Constitution of the United States, and with it sundry other documents concerned with Law. Another trip to New Orleans, & further opportunity for meditat- ing on the sale of human beings, and in 1 83 1 we find him, independent now of home & family, serving in a store at New Salem in Sangamon County, Illinois. Here he at once acquired a reputation for integrity and force of chara&er, and was soon a conspicuous figure in the little township. He was fighting hard with life, terribly determined to keep square with his conscience. When he gave a woman customer in the store six and a half cents short in change he walked six miles in his own time to repair the mistake. Here he led a company of volunteers as Captain against the Indians in the Black Hawk War. His men fought hard but told him to go to hell when he gave orders off the field. And it was here that he met and loved Anne Rutledge, was engaged to her, and watched her die of fever,agirlof twentytwo whose name has taken on a lyric beauty for ever, a beauty exquisitely captured by Edgar Lee Masters in — Out of me unworthy and unknown The vibrations of deathless music; I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln, Wedded to him, not through union, i*3> But through separation. Bloom forever, O Republic, From the dust of my bosom! As she was dying, says Mr. Sandburg, Lincoln rode out to her farm. 'They let him in; they left the two together and alone a last hour in the log house, with slants of light on her face from an open clapboard door/ The memory of that hour was a sorrow that never lost its passion. It was in New Salem too that Lincoln first began to take part in local politics, and found, in a heap of rubbish, a copy of Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, with the results that he got him' self ele&ed to the Illinois Legislature, and became a lawyer. In 1837 he opened a law office in Spring- field on a capital of seven dollars, and in debt to the tune of another thousand that he had borrowed from friends, who thought him peculiarsome but had a faith that somehow he would pay them back, which he did. For twenty-three years he lived in Springfield, prospering in his profession, becoming more & more talked of as a personality, sometimes eleded for the State Legislature and sometimes defeated, and for a time serving as Congressman at Washington. When he first went into the town he was tough in fibre, properly ambitious, notable as he joined any com- pany, and as likely to become President of the United States as the curate of the church down the way is to become Archbishop of Canterbury. It is said that he told friends with some seriousness that he intended to go to the White House. Doubtless some thous- ands of young men had the same intention. But it is an impressive thought that at all times, even to-day, while the thousands are cherishing this illusion, two or three of them will thirty years or so hence prove against all the odds that it was no illusion after all. It is like a sweepstake; in a million people someone has got to bring off a million to one chance. If Lincoln did make the boast, he was going to be justified, but in 1837 and for twenty years after there was not the smallest probability that he would be. * And yet the Springfield days were an ordered pro- bation. The imaginative, which is not the fanciful, mind, contemplating Lincoln's place in history, is apt to see the man coming forward from obscurity to di- red his country's fortunes at a supreme crisis. In a sense it is true of Lincoln as it is of Cromwell that the hour made the man, and the imagination is rightly moved by ordinances so unexpectedly asserted. The €*5 J elevation of men like these, at a sudden call, from nar- row local influence to national power may well seem to be divinely appointed, and is a theme that has al- ways stirred the poets. But close investigation gener- ally reveals a preparation which, if it was by no means likely to lead to such an event, was necessary if the event was to be possible. And so it was with Lincoln. The obscure pioneer politician whom we see emerg- ing from the recesses of Illinois in i860 to take con- trol at Washington, & after five years of authority to make an end leaving a name sweetly memorable for ever, may assume the character of a god out of the machine. But if so, he comes fully armed with experi- ence patiently acquired during those twenty years on the Springfield circuit. His mind has been disciplined in pra&ical knowledge of law and institutions, in de- bate, in understanding the needs of a hardy young community spreading with startling rapidity over a vast continent. He has learnt, too, a great deal about men, how to suffer fools at least until he is sure that nothing can bring them to a sense of their folly, how to accommodate difficulties, how to respedl the oth- er point of view, and how to tell honesty from feign- ing. Above all, he has already accustomed his heart to the charity for all that' is presently to be his last and loveliest challenge against darkness. $2.6} It was at Springfield that Lincoln married Mary Todd, he then being thirty-three years of age. That his heart was ever greatly in the enterprise we may doubt,butMary Lincoln could help her husband with sound advice on occasion, and displaying herself as she believed to much advantage at the White House, has taken a less conspicuous place in history. At her best she encouraged Lincoln to a belief in his own powers; at her worst she was unable to wear out his patience. The man ele&ed by the Republican party to the Presidency in i860 had a few months earlier made his appearance before an audience representing the culture and intellect of the east. At Cooper Union in New York some fifteen hundred people assembled while a snowstorm swept over the city, and were as- tonished when a gaunt, uncouth man, inches over six feet in height, dressed in no fashion, with enormous feet and terribly conscious of his hands, stepped on to the platform. If this was the possible candidate pro- duced by the West for supreme office, it must be al- lowed that he was a very strange one. Culture and in- tellect were almost inclined to titter in spite of good breeding. Think of the Mayflower: lines of long de- scent. Think of Mr. Seward. But as Mr.Lincoln went on speaking Mr. Seward seemed to matter rather less. 4>7f The mildly disdainful curiosity gave place to startled admiration. Intelled and culture needs must salute a sincerity so convincing, needs must see themselves transfigured in such homely logic, such native digni- ty. This man, authentically, was prophesying before them. As he made an end, the great audience forgot its decorum and surged up to the speaker in waves of enthusiasm. A new and grandly incalculable person- ality had come into the national life of America; had, indeed, come into history, with brief but imperish- able annals to be told. * Of Abraham Lincoln's Presidency this is not the place to attempt even a summary, still less may we debate the political and martial agony by which it was conditioned. Seen in perspective, heroic resolu- tions always have the appearance of sublime simpli- city; to the participants at the time they are entan- gled often in a network of intrigue that hampers if it does not destroy the heroism. Never have the con- fusion of motives & the shocks of interest been more violent than they were in the American Civil War, and Lincoln, as all other public men, was charged with every kind of malice and duplicity. His distinc- tion lay in the fad that in common circumstances he conduced himself in no common way. For the €*8> shrewdest political wits his own were an easy match, but he never allowed the unlovely necessities of of- fice to impair his native candour or harden his native tenderness. Under every trial he remained truthful and generous. With exceptional opportunities for discovering what human harshness and perfidy could be, he never lost his faith in human goodness. Called upon daily to deal with complicated abstractions, he reduced them steadily to bare and intimate essentials, the larger figures of rhetoric having no attraction for him. Placed at the head of a great people, he thought of them always in terms of individual men & women. And so he is remembered, after all the smother has passed, simply as the man who saved the American Union, and in the process abolished slavery. Even those, if there are any, who question the ultimate wis- dom of these achievements, cannot deny their great- ness. He is remembered also as a man who, conduct- ing a nation through a shattering crisis, remained warm, accessible, a friend to anyone who cared to ask for his friendship. Lincoln was a very great man, and was conscious of his power and quality; but he never behaved or thought of himself as The Great Man. He had come through too vigilant a school for that. The stories of 9 J his solicitude for others are many. I will tell one that I picked up, not, I think, told in print before. Early in the war when he was paying a visit to an army hos- pital, he came across a young soldier convalescing from wounds. The boy told him that he was going on leave for a fortnight, during which he hoped to marry a girl to whom he was engaged. Three years later a commanding officer called for a volunteer to take a dispatch through dangerous country to Lin- coln at Washington. The same young man offered to go, and getting through safely was admitted at the White House. Lincoln took the envelope and, look- ing for a moment at the messenger, turned away be- fore opening it and stood staring out of the window, searching his recolle&ion. Then he turned again with 'Did you marry the girl?' That was the Presi- dent of the United States in 1 864. The conjun&ion of such grace with such eminence is our clue. Lincoln's power came to its maturity in a time of war, and although the course of the struggle and the issues involved have now emerged in an outline up- on which disagreement is scarcely possible, this war was in its time, like all other wars, mired in almost indescribable muddle and apparent futility. The end and the means to that end may always have been clear to Lincoln, but before the end was reached he € 3° > had to lead a hundred discordant energies through weary months, even years, of confusion. Often he seemed hardly to be leading them at all. His minis- ters, his generals, his political managers, the press — among all these were to be found patriots who were convinced that Lincoln was a fool,and that the prob- lem was how to make his folly as inoperative as pos- sible. Late at night he calls with his Secretary of State on McClellan, then Commander-in-Chief. McClel- lan is out. They wait, and at length the general re- turns, out of humour, hears that the President is wait- ing for him, and goes straight to bed. Lincoln returns home, and his Secretary remonstrates with him. It seems to Lincoln not to be a time for 'making points of etiquette and personal dignity.' He adds: 'I will hold McClellan's horse if he will win me victories.' But casual, even vacillating as he may have seemed in such incidents, Lincoln all the time was nursing his resolves and consolidating his principles. He saw everyone who called at the White House, chiefly, as he said, because 'Men moving only in an official circle are apt to become merely official — not to say arbitrary — in their ideas, and are apter and apter with each passing day to forget that they only hold power in a representative capacity.' Often his visitors came to join in the chorus of disparagement, but not always. Mr. Nathaniel Wright Stephenson, in his admirable book on Lincoln, tells us of one who called: 'a large, fleshy man of a stern but homely counte- nance and a solemn and dignified carriage, immacu- late dress, swallo w-tailed coat, ruffled shirt of faultless fabric, white cravat, and orange-colored gloves.' Look- ing at him Lincoln was somewhat appalled. He ex- pected some formidable demand. To his relief the im- posing stranger delivered a brief harangue on the President's policy, closing with: 'I have watched you narrowly ever since your inauguration. . . As one of your constituents I now say to you, "do in future as you damn please, and I will support you/' * And what none of his critics realised was that, in spite of their invedtive, reinforced often by double- dealing, Lincoln was all the time moving in his calm, spiritual deliberation, doing as he did damn please. For there are two characteristics that we have clearly to realise if we would understand Lincoln. The first is at the very heart of his essential greatness. A lesson that history teaches us with unwearying patience, and one which is yet unheeded by many a&ive mem- bers of society, is that the truly great man is not the extremist, however devoted his courage or pictur- esque his personality may be. The rebels have their honour in the world, and rightly. Their cause is oft- en enlightened, and they serve it often with a loyalty that is reckless of self-interest, a loyalty, it may be noted, which may be no less staunch when the cause happens to be a rea&ionary one. The Die-Hards of English politics are no less honourably true to a faith than the Vengeances from the Clyde. But given the admittedly rare virtue of personal fearlessness, this kind of fanaticism, whatever its purpose, is a far less majestic thing in character than the tenacity with which the really heroic men of the world have pur- sued a moderate course, refusing to be intimidated by furies on either side of them. And of the great moderates in history (one might, perhaps, call them moderators) none is greater than Lincoln. His fixed aim from the first in the war was to preserve the Union ; at a later stage, after long med- itation, he further declared for abolition, with reason- able terms of compensation. From these two pur- poses nothing could seduce him, but he would at no time allow his intentions to be complicated by the demands of extremists in any party. He was deaf alike to the Vindi&ives and the Pacifists, who in their dif- ferent ways were trying to stampede him. The Vin- di&ives were all for destroying the South by the im- position of extreme political and material penalties. Lincoln would have none of it. Let the South come back to the Union, and let it admit that the institu- tion of slavery had been discredited, and the old rela- tions should be renewed as though the war had never happened. Towards the Pacifists he was equally firm. No man was ever more pacific in nature than Lincoln himself, but no appeals to his almost agonisingly sen- sitive humanity could weaken his resolve until the integrity of the Union had been established, as he hoped, beyond the possibility of further attack. * The other characteristic of which we speak is Lin- coln's loneliness of mind, a theme worthy of the Greek tragedians. In administrative affairs he was anxious, even at times unduly anxious, for advice, and in the routine of office he could sometimes be a little careless in the choice of deputies. But in the for- mation of principles he consulted nobody. When a decision involving fundamental principle had to be made, the period of Lincoln's speculation would be a long one, and while it lasted his most intimate as- sociates could tell nothing of what he was thinking. Then suddenly his intentions would be stated in un- equivocal terms, and that was an end of the matter. This gave easy play to detra&ors, and the opportuni- ties were freely and not always scrupulously taken. €34> But Lincoln's justification was that his conclusions truly were founded upon principles, and that his in- telle&ual understanding of principles was, in the sphere of adion, the finest in the country. It is a justi- fication that has now made a noble and durable im- pression upon mankind, and America has given a hero to the world. 4- It is sometimes said that Lincoln's story would have been less memorable had it not been so sudden- ly and so violently closed. Such surmise profits no- body. There is no reason to suppose that had he lived Lincoln would not have brought to reconstruction the strong and lovely qualities that he had exercised in war. History rightly takes no note of events that were and must remain unborn. And the imagination of men, fixed on reality, disregards them also. Our delight in the story of our race is not to wonder aim- lessly what might have been, but to realise the true significance of what was. To the story of Lincoln we could wish to add nothing, since nothing could en- rich or dignify it; and that something of its splendour might have been lost in other circumstances does not trouble our delight. /