The Life Story of Abraham Lincoln -5

The Life Story of Abraham Lincoln -5

It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal
of a man is tested; it is by the sagacity to see, and the
fearless honesty to admit, whatever of truth there may be in
an adverse opinion, in order more convincingly to expose the
fallacy that lurks behind it, that a reasoner at length gains
for his mere statement of a fact the force of argument; it is
by a wise forecast which allows hostile combinations to go so
far as by the inevitable reaction to become elements of his
own power, that a politician proves his genius for
state-craft; and especially it is by so gently guiding public
sentiment that he seems to follow it, by so yielding doubtful
points that he can be firm without seeming obstinate in
essential ones, and thus gain the advantages of compromise
without the weakness of concession; by so instinctively
comprehending the temper and prejudices of a people as to
make them gradually conscious of the superior wisdom of his
freedom from temper and prejudice,--it is by qualities 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 and the most successful
of rulers. If we wish to appreciate him, we have only to
conceive the inevitable 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
interest, while the new man must slowly and painfully create
all these out of the unwilling material around him, by
superiority of character, by patient singleness of purpose,
by sagacious presentiment of popular tendencies and
instinctive sympathy with the national character. 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 represents the abstract idea of
government as a permanent principle superior to all party and
all private interest, had gradually become unfamiliar.