The Life Story of Abraham Lincoln -8

The Life Story of Abraham Lincoln -8

Mr. Lincoln's policy was a tentative one, and
rightly so. He laid down no programme which must compel him
to be either inconsistent or unwise, no cast-iron theorem to
which circumstances must be fitted as they rose, or else be
useless to his ends. He seemed to have chosen Mazarin's
motto, *Le temps et moi.*(1) The *moi,* to be sure, was not
very prominent at first; but it has grown more and more so,
till the world is beginning to be persuaded that it stands
for a character of marked individuality and capacity for
affairs. Time was his prime-minister, and, we began to
think, at one period, his general-in-chief also. At first he
was so slow that he tired out all those who see no evidence
of progress but in blowing up the engine; then he was so
fast, that he took the breath away from those who think there
is no getting on safety while there is a spark of fire under
the boilers. God is the only being who has time enough; but
a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly
make a shift to find as much as he needs. Mr. Lincoln, as it
seems to us in reviewing his career, though we have sometimes
in our impatience thought otherwise, has always waited, as a
wise man should, till the right moment brought up all his
reserves. *Semper nocuit differre paratis,*(2) is a sound
axiom, but the really efficacious man will also be sure to
know when he is *not* ready, and be firm against all
persuasion and reproach till he is. (1) Time and I.
Cardinal Mazarin was prime-minister of Louis XIV. of France.
Time, Mazarin said, was his prime-minister. (2) It is always
bad for those who are ready to put off action. One would be
apt to think, from some of the criticisms made on Mr.
Lincoln's course by those who mainly agree with him in
principle, that the chief object of a statesman should be
rather to proclaim his adhesion to certain doctrines, than to
achieve their triumph by quietly accomplishing his ends. In
our opinion, there is no more unsafe politician than a
conscientiously rigid *doctrinaire,* nothing more sure to end
in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that admits of
no pliability for contingencies. True, there is a popular
image of an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the
submissive destinies of mankind become as wax, and to whose
commanding necessity the toughest facts yield with the
graceful pliancy of fiction; but in real life we commonly
find that the men who control circumstances, as it is called,
are those who have learned to allow for the influence of
their eddies, and have the nerve to turn them to account at
the happy instant. Mr. Lincoln's perilous task has been to
carry a rather shaky raft through the rapids, making fast the
unrulier logs as he could snatch opportunity, and the country
is to be congratulated that he did not think it his duty to
run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to assure himself
with his setting-pole where the main current was, and keep
steadily to that.