Il6 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



pathy with the treason, of the Southern conspirators, had just 

 surrendered the reins, we will not say of power, but of chaos, 

 to a successor known only as the representative of a party 

 whose leaders, with long training in opposition, had none in 

 the conduct of affairs; an empty treasury was called on to 

 supply resources beyond precedent in the history of finance; 

 the trees were yet growing and the iron unmined with which 

 a navy was to be built and armoured; officers without dis 

 cipline were to make a mob into an army; and, above all, the 

 public opinion of Europe, echoed and reinforced with every 

 vague hint and every specious argument of despondency by 

 a powerful faction at home, was either contemptuously scep 

 tical or actively hostile. It would be hard to over-estimate 

 the force of this latter element of disintegration and dis 

 couragement among a people where every citizen at home, 

 and every soldier in the field, is a reader of newspapers. The 

 pedlars of rumour in the North were the most effective allies 

 of the rebellion. A nation can be liable to no more insidious 

 treachery than that of the telegraph, sending hourly its elec 

 tric thrill of panic along the remotest nerves of the commu 

 nity, till the excited imagination makes every real danger 

 loom heightened with its unreal double. 



And even if we look only at more palpable difficulties, the 

 problem to be solved by our civil war was so vast, both in its 

 immediate relations and its future consequences; the con 

 ditions of its solution were so intricate and so greatly de 

 pendent on incalculable and uncontrollable contingencies; so 

 many of the data, whether for hope or fear, were, from their 

 novelty, incapable of arrangement under any of the categories 

 of historical precedent, that there were moments of crisis 

 when the firmest believer in the strength and sufficiency of 

 the democratic theory of government might well hold his 

 breath in vague apprehension of disaster. Our teachers of 

 political philosophy, solemnly arguing from the precedent of 

 some petty Grecian, Italian, or Flemish city, whose long 

 periods of aristocracy were broken now and then by awkward 

 parentheses of mob, had always taught us that democracies 

 were incapable of the sentiment of loyalty, of concentrated 

 and prolonged effort, of far-reaching conceptions ; were ab 

 sorbed in material interests ; impatient of regular, and much 

 more of exceptional restraint ; had no natural nucleus of 

 gravitation, nor any forces but centrifugal ; were always on 

 the verge of civil war, and slunk at last into the natural alms? 



