The Life Story of Abraham Lincoln -4

The Life Story of Abraham Lincoln -4

All this was to be done without warning and without preparation,
while at the same time a social revolution was to be
accomplished in the political condition of four millions of
people, by softening the prejudices, allaying the fears, and
gradually obtaining the cooperation, of their unwilling
liberators. Surely, if ever there were an occasion when the
heightened imagination of the historian might see Destiny
visibly intervening in human affairs, here was a knot worthy
of her shears. Never, perhaps, was any system of government
tried by so continuous and searching a strain as ours during
the last three years; never has any shown itself stronger;
and never could that strength be so directly traced to the
virtue and intelligence of the people,--to that general
enlightenment and prompt efficiency of public opinion
possible only under the influence of a political framework
like our own. We find it hard to understand how even a
foreigner should be blind to the grandeur of the combat of
ideas that has been going on here,--to the heroic energy,
persistency, and self-reliance of a nation proving that it
knows how much dearer greatness is than mere power; and we
own that it is impossible for us to conceive the mental and
moral condition of the American who does not feel his spirit
braced and heightened by being even a spectator of such
qualities and achievements. That a steady purpose and a
definite aim have been given to the jarring forces which, at
the beginning of the war, spent themselves in the discussion
of schemes which could only become operative, if at all,
after the war was over; that a popular excitement has been
slowly intensified into an earnest national will; that a
somewhat impracticable moral sentiment has been made the
unconscious instrument of a practical moral end; that the
treason of covert enemies, the jealousy of rivals, the unwise
zeal of friends, have been made not only useless for
mischief, but even useful for good; that the conscientious
sensitiveness of England to the horrors of civil conflict has
been prevented from complicating a domestic with a foreign
war;--all these results, any one of which might suffice to
prove greatness in a ruler, have been mainly due to the good
sense, the good-humor, the sagacity, the large-mindedness,
and the unselfish honesty of the unknown man whom a blind
fortune, as it seemed, had lifted from the crowd to the most
dangerous and difficult eminence of modern times.