ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 153 



firmest believer in the strength and sufficiency of the 

 democratic theory of ^government might well hold his 

 breath in vague apprehension of disaster. Our teachers 

 of political philosophy, solemnly arguing from the pre- 

 cedent of some petty Grecian, Italian, or Flemish city, 

 whose long periods of aristocracy were broken now and 

 then by awkward parentheses of mob, had always taught 

 us that democracies were incapable of the sentiment of 

 loyalty, of concentrated and prolonged effort, of far-reach- 

 ing conceptions; were absorbed in material interests; im- 

 patient of regular, and much more of exceptional restraint ; 

 had no natural nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but 

 centrifugal ; were always on the verge of civil war, and 

 slunk at last into the natural almshouse of bankrupt 

 popular government, a military despotism. Here was 

 indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew democ- 

 racy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but 

 merely from books, and America only by the report of 

 some fellow-Briton, who, having eaten a bad dinner or 

 lost a carpet-bag here, had written to the Times demand- 

 ing redress, and drawing a mournful inference of demo- 

 cratic instability. Nor were men wanting among our- 

 selves who had so steeped their brains in London 

 literature as to mistake Cockneyism for European cul- 

 ture, and contempt of their country for cosmopolitan 

 breadth of view, and who, owing all they had and all 

 they were to democracy, thought it had an air of high- 

 breeding to join in the shallow epicedium that our bub- 

 ble had burst. 



But beside any disheartening influences which might 

 affect the timid or the despondent, there were reasons 

 enough of settled gravity against any over-confidence of 

 hope. A war — which, whether we consider the expanse 

 of the territory at stake, the hosts brought into the field, 

 or the reach of the principles involved, may fairly be 

 7* 



