ABRAHAM LINCOLN. Ii; 



house of bankrupt popular government, a military despotism. 

 Here was indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew 

 democracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but 

 merely from books, and America only by the report of some 

 fellow-Briton, who, having eaten a bad dinner or lost a carpet 

 bag here, had written to the Times demanding redress, and 

 drawing a mournful inference of democratic instability. Nor 

 were men wanting among ourselves who had so steeped their 

 brains in London literature as to mistake Cockneyism for 

 European culture, and contempt of their country for cosmo 

 politan breadth of view, and who, owing all they had and 

 all they were to democracy, thought it had an air of high- 

 breeding to join in the shallow epicedium that our bubble 

 had burst. 



But beside any disheartening influences which might 

 affect the timid or the despondent, there were reasons 

 enough of settled gravity against any over-confidence of 

 hope. A war which, whether we consider the expanse of 

 the territory at stake, the hosts brought into the field, or the 

 reach of the principles involved, may fairly be reckoned the 

 most momentous of modern times was to be waged by a 

 people divided at home, unnerved by fifty years of peace, 

 under a chief magistrate without experience and without 

 reputation, whose every measure was sure to be cunningly 

 hampered by a jealous and unscrupulous minority, and who, 

 while dealing with unheard-of complications at home, musi 

 soothe a hostile neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to 

 become war. All this was to be done without warning and 

 without preparation, while at the same time a social revolu 

 tion was to be accomplished in the political condition of four 

 millions of people, by softening the prejudices, allaying the 

 fears, arrd gradually obtaining the co-operation of their un 

 willing liberators. Surely, if ever there were an occasion 

 when the heightened imagination of the historian might sec 

 Destiny visibly intervening in human affairs, here was a 

 knot worthy of her shears. Never, perhaps, was any system 

 of government tried by so continuous and searching a strain 

 as ours during the last three years ; never has any shown 

 itself stronger ; and never could that strength be so directly 

 traced to the virtue and intelligence of the people to that 

 general enlightenment and prompt efficiency of public opinion 

 possible only under the influence of a political framework 

 like our own. We find it hard to understand how even a 



