ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 113 



the touch of nature like stubble in the fire. The genius 

 that sways a nation by its arbitrary will seems less august 

 to us than that which multiplies and reinforces itself in the 

 instincts and convictions of an entire people. Autocracy 

 may have something in it more melodramatic than this, but 

 falls far short of it in human value and interest. 



Experience would have bred in us a rooted distrust of 

 improvised statesmanship, even if we did not believe politics 

 to be a science, which, if it cannot always command men 

 of special aptitude and great powers, at least demands the 

 long and steady application of the best powers of such men 

 as it can command to master even its first principles. It is 

 curious that, in a country which boasts of its intelligence, 

 the theory should be so generally held that the most com 

 plicated of human contrivances, and one which every day 

 becomes more complicated, can be worked at sight by any 

 man able to talk for an hour or two without stopping to 

 think. 



Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example of a 

 ready-made ruler. But no case could well be less in point ; 

 for, besides that he was a man of such fair-mindedness as is 

 always the raw material of wisdom, he had in his profession 

 a training precisely the opposite of that to which a partisan 

 is subjected. His experience as a lawyer compelled him 

 riot only to see that there is a principle underlying every 

 phenomenon in human affairs, but that there are always two 

 sides to every question, both of which must be fully under 

 stood in order to understand either, and that it is of greater 

 advantage to an advocate to appreciate the strength than 

 the weakness of his antagonist s position. Nothing is more 

 remarkable than the unerring tact with which, in his debate 

 with Mr. Douglas, he went straight to the reason of the 

 question ; nor have we ever had a more striking lesson in 

 political tactics than the fact, that, opposed to a man excep 

 tionally adroit in using popular prejudice and bigotry to his 

 purpose, exceptionally unscrupulous in appealing to those 

 baser motives that turn a meeting of citizens into a mob of 

 barbarians, he should yet have won his case before a jury of 



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