The Life Story of Abraham Lincoln -11

The Life Story of Abraham Lincoln 

Experience would have bred in us a
rooted distrust of improved 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 complicated 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 not 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 understood 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 exceptionally 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 the people. Mr. Lincoln
was as far as possible from an impromptu politician. His
wisdom was made up of a knowledge of things as well as of
men; his sagacity resulted from a clear perception and honest
acknowledgment of difficulties, which enabled him to see that
the only durable triumph of political opinion is based, not
on any abstract right, but upon so much of justice, the
highest attainable at any given moment in human affairs, as
may be had in the balance of mutual concession. Doubtless he
had an ideal, but it was the ideal of a practical
statesman,--to aim at the best, and to take the next best, if
he is lucky enough to get even that. His slow, but
singularly masculine, intelligence taught him that precedent
is only another name for embodied experience, and that it
counts for even more in the guidance of communities of men
than in that of the individual life.