104 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



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 concep 

 tions ; were absorbed in material interests ; impatient of 

 regular, and much more of exceptional restraint; had no 

 natural nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but centri 

 fugal ; were always on the verge of civil war, and slunk at 

 last into the natural almshouse of bankrupt popular govern 

 ment, a military despotism. Here was 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 Oockneyism for European culture, 

 and contempt of their country for cosmopolitan 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, must 

 soothe a hostile neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to 



