126 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



what he gained he occupied, and his advanced posts be 

 came colonies. The very homeliness of his genius was its 

 distinction. His kingship was conspicuous by its workday 

 homespun. Never was ruler so absolute as he, nor so little 

 conscious of it; for he was the incarnate common-sense 

 of the people. With all that tenderness of nature whose 

 sweet sadness touched whoever saw him with something of 

 its own pathos, there was no trace of sentimentalism in his 

 speech or action. He seems to have had but one rule of 

 conduct, always that of practical and successful politics, to 

 let himself be guided by events, when they were sure to bring 

 him out where he wished to go, though by what seemed to 

 unpractical minds, which let go the possible to grasp at the 

 desirable, a longer road. 



Undoubtedly the highest function of statesmanship is by 

 degrees to accommodate the conduct of communities to 

 ethical laws, and to subordinate the conflicting self-interests 

 of the day to higher and more permanent concerns. But it 

 is on the understanding, and not on the sentiment, of a 

 nation that all safe legislation must be based. -Voltaire s 

 saying, that a consideration of petty circumstances is the 

 tomb of great things, may be true of individual men, but it 

 certainly is not true of governments. It is by a multitude of 

 such considerations, each in itself trifling, but all together 

 weighty, that the framers of policy can alone divine what is 

 practicable and therefore wise. The imputation of incon 

 sistency is one to which every sound politician and every 

 honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The 

 foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion. The 

 course of a great statesman resembles that of navigable 

 rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of 

 concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which 

 men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking 

 the almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet 

 always aiming at direct advances, always recruited from 

 sources nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths 

 of progress and fruitful human commerce through what seem 

 the eternal barriers of both. It is loyalty to great ends, even 

 though forced to combine the small and opposing motives of 

 selfish men to accomplish them ; it is the anchored cling to 

 solid principles of duty and action, which knows how to 

 swing with the tide, but is never carried away by it that 

 we demand in public men, and not sameness of policy, or a 



