ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 159 



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 stigmatized as proof 

 of lukewarmness and backsliding by the other. Mean 

 while he was to carry on a truly colossal war by means 

 of both ; he was to disengage the country from diplo 

 matic entanglements of unprecedented peril undisturbed 

 by the help or the hinderance of either, and to win from 

 the crowning dangers of his administration, in the con 

 fidence 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 in 

 the confidence of the people as he does after three years 

 of 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 prominent 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 progress 

 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 pi'udent man, who knows how to seize occasion, 

 can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs. 

 Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to iis in reviewing his career, 

 though we have sometimes in our impatience thought 



