156 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



of his freedom from temper and prejudice, — it is by 

 qiialities such as these that a magistrate shows himself 

 worthy to be chief in a commonwealth of freemen. And 

 it is for qualities such as these that we firmly believe 

 History will rank Mr. Lincoln among the most prudent 

 of statesmen jmd the most successful of rulers. If we 

 wish to appreciate him, we have only to conceive the in- 

 evitable chaos in which we should now be weltering, had 

 a weak man or an unwise one been chosen in his stead. 



" Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, " without 

 brother behind it " ; and this is, by analogy, true of an 

 elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler in any critical 

 emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible resources of 

 prestige, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent in- 

 terest, wdiile the new man must slowly and painfully 

 create all these out of the imwilling material around 

 him, by superiority of character, by patient singleness 

 of purpose, by sagacious presentiment of popular ten- 

 dencies and instinctive sympathy w4th the national char- 

 acter, Mr. Lincoln's task was one of peculiar and 

 exceptional difficulty. Long habit had accustomed the 

 American people to the notion of a party in power, and 

 of a President as its creature and organ, while the more 

 vital fact, that the executive for the time being repre- 

 sents the abstract idea of government as a permanent 

 principle superior to all party and all private interest, 

 had gradually become unfamiliar. They had so l(>ng 

 seen the public policy more or less directed by views of 

 party, and often even of personal advantage, as to be 

 ready to suspect the motives of a chief magistrate com- 

 pelled, for the first time in oiir histoiy, to feel himself 

 the head and hand of a gi-eat nation, and to act upon 

 the fundamental maxim, laid down by all publicifis, 

 that the first duty of a government is to defend and 

 maintain its own existence. Accordingly, a powerful 



