ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 109 



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 communicant 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 ir the con 

 fidence of the people as he does after three years o 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 

 character 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 pro 

 gress 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 



