The Life Story of Abraham Lincoln -13

The Life Story of Abraham Lincoln -13

The imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and
every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself.
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.
The course of a great statesman resembles that of navigable
rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of
concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men
soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the
almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always
aiming at direct advances, always recruited from sources
nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress
and fruitful human commerce through what seem the eternal
barriers of both. It is loyalty to great ends, even though
forced to combine the small and opposing motives of selfish
men to accomplish them; it is the anchored cling to solid
principles of duty and action, which knows how to swing with
the tide, but is never carried away by it,--that we demand in
public men, and not sameness of policy, or a conscientious
persistency in what is impracticable. For the impracticable,
however theoretically enticing, is always politically unwise,
sound statesmanship being the application of that prudence to
the public business which is the safest guide in that of
private men. No doubt slavery was the most delicate and
embarrassing question with which Mr. Lincoln was called on to
deal, and it was one which no man in his position, whatever
his opinions, could evade; for, though he might withstand the
clamor of partisans, he must sooner or later yield to the
persistent importunacy of circumstances, which thrust the
problem upon him at every turn and in every shape. It has
been brought against us as an accusation abroad, and repeated
here by people who measure their country rather by what is
thought of it than by what is, that our war has not been
distinctly and avowedly for the extinction of slavery, but a
war rather for the preservation of our national power and
greatness, in which the emancipation of the negro has been
forced upon us by circumstances and accepted as a necessity.
We are very far from denying this; nay, we admit that it is
so far true that we were slow to renounce our constitutional
obligations even toward those who had absolved us by their
own act from the letter of our duty. We are speaking of the
government which, legally installed for the whole country,
was bound, so long as it was possible, not to overstep the
limits of orderly prescription, and could not, without
abnegating its own very nature, take the lead off a Virginia
reel. They forgot, what should be forgotten least of all in
a system like ours, that the administration for the time
being represents not only the majority which elects it, but
the minority as well,--a minority in this case powerful, and
so little ready for emancipation that it was opposed even to
war. Mr. Lincoln had not been chosen as general agent of the
an anti-slavery society, but President of the United States,
to perform certain functions exactly defined by law.
Whatever were his wishes, it was no less duty than policy to
mark out for himself a line of action that would not further
distract the country, by raising before their time questions
which plainly would soon enough compel attention, and for
which every day was making the answer more easy.