ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 163 



it, or see in it any reason why he should govern Ameri- 

 cans the less wisely. 



People of more sensitive organizations may be shocked, 

 but we are glad that in this our true war of indepen- 

 dence, which is to free us forever from the Old World, 

 we have had at the head of our affairs a man whom 

 America made, as God made Adam, out of the very 

 earth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown, to show us 

 how much truth, how much magnanimity, and how much 

 statecraft await the call of opportunity in simple man- 

 hood when it believes in the justice of God and the 

 worth of man. Conventionalities are all very well in 

 their proper place, but they shrivel at 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 com- 

 mand 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 complicated of human con- 

 trivances, and one which every day becomes more com- 

 plicated, 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-mind- 

 edness as is always the raw material of wisdom, he had 



