ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 103 



the impersonal loyalty of principle? These were serious 

 questions, and with no precedent to aid in answering them. 



At the beginning of the war there was, indeed, occasion 

 for the most anxious apprehension. A President known to 

 be infected with the political heresies, and suspected of 

 sympathy 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 represent 

 ative of a party whose leaders, with long training in opposi 

 tion, 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 discipline 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 sceptical or actively hostile. It 

 would be hard to over-estimate the force of this latter 

 element of disintegration and discouragement 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 electric thrill 

 of panic along the remotest nerves of the community, 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 

 conditions of its solution were so intricate and so greatly 

 dependent on incalculable and uncontrollable contingencies j 

 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 



