ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 121 



of principle, in strength of will ; that a man who was at best 

 only the representative of a party, and who yet did not fairly 

 represent even that, would fail of political, much more of 

 popular, support. And certainly no one ever entered upon 

 office with so few resources of power in the past, and so 

 many materials of weakness in the present, as Mr. Lincoln. 

 Even in that half of the Union which acknowledged him as 

 President, there was a large, and at that time dangerous 

 minority, that hardly admitted his claim to the office, and 

 even in the party that elected him there was also a large 

 minority that suspected him of being secretly a communi 

 cant with the church of Laodicea. All that he did was sure 

 to be virulently attacked as ultra by one side ; all that he 

 left undone, to be stigmatised as proof of lukewarmness and 

 backsliding by the other. Meanwhile he was to carry on a 

 truly colossal war by means of both ; he was to disengage 

 the country from diplomatic entanglements of unprecedented 

 peril undisturbed by the help or the hindrance of either, and 

 to win from the crowning dangers of his administration, in 

 the confidence of the people, the means of his safety and 

 their own. He has contrived to do it, and perhaps none of 

 our Presidents since Washington has stood so firm in the 

 confidence of the people as he does after three years of 

 stormy administration. 



Mr. Lincoln s policy was a tentative one, and rightly so. 

 He laid down no programme which must compel him to be 

 either inconsistent or unwise, no cast-iron theorem to which 

 circumstances must be fitted as they rose, or else be useless 

 to his ends. He seemed to have chosen Mazarin s motto, 

 Le temps et moi. The moi, to be sure, was not very promi 

 nent at first ; but it has grown more and more so, till the 

 world is beginning to be persuaded that it stands for a cha 

 racter of marked individuality and capacity for affairs. Time 

 was his prime minister, and, we began to think, at one 

 period, his general-in-chief also. At first he was so slow 

 that he tired out all those who see no evidence of progress 

 but in blowing up the engine ; then he was so fast that he 

 took the breath away from those who think there is no 

 getting on safely while there is a spark of fire under the 

 boilers. God is the only being who has time enough; but 

 a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can com 

 monly make a shift to find as much as he needs. Mr. Lin 

 coln, as it seems to us in reviewing his career, though we 



