Abraham Lincoln | Page 6

of those
periods of excitement, gathering, contagious, universal, which, while
they last, exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving to the mere words
*country, human rights, democracy,* a meaning and a force beyond
that of sober and logical argument. They were convictions, maintained
and defended by the supreme logic of passion. That penetrating fire ran
in and roused those primary instincts that make their lair in the dens
and caverns of the mind. What is called the great popular heart was
awakened, that indefinable something which may be, according to
circumstances, the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But
enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into anything better
than cant,--and phrases, when once the inspiration that filled them with
beneficent power has ebbed away, retain only that semblance of
meaning which enables them to supplant reason in hasty minds. Among
the lessons taught by the French Revolution there is none sadder or
more striking than this, that you may make everything else out of the
passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there
is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated
into dogma. It is always demoralizing to extend the domain of
sentiment over questions where it has no legitimate jurisdiction; and
perhaps the severest strain upon Mr. Lincoln was in resisting a
tendency of his own supporters which chimed with his own private
desires, while wholly opposed to his convictions of what would be wise
policy.
The change which three years have brought about is too remarkable to
be passed over without comment, too weighty in its lesson not to be
laid to heart. Never did a President enter upon office with less means at
his command, outside his own strength of heart and steadiness of
understanding, for inspiring confidence in the people, and so winning it
for himself, than Mr. Lincoln. All that was known of him was that he
was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his *availability,*--that is,
because he had no history,--and chosen by a party with whose more
extreme opinions he was not in sympathy. It might well be feared that a
man past fifty, against whom the ingenuity of hostile partisans could
rake up no accusation, must be lacking in manliness of character, in
decision of principle, in strength of will; that a man who was at best
only the representative of a party, and who yet did not fairly represent

even that, would fail of political, much more of popular, support. And
certainly no one ever entered upon office with so few resources of
power in the past, and so many materials of weakness in the present, as
Mr. Lincoln. Even in that half of the Union which acknowledged him
as President, there was a large, and at that time dangerous, minority,
that hardly admitted his claim to the office, and even in the party that
elected him there was also a large minority that suspected him of being
secretly a communicant with the church of Laodicea.(1) All he did was
sure to be virulently attacked as ultra by one side; all that he left
undone, to be stigmatized as proof of lukewarmness and backsliding by
the other. Meanwhile he was to carry on a truly colossal war by means
of both; he was to disengage the country from diplomatic
entanglements of unprecedented peril undisturbed by the help or the
hindrance of either, and to win from the crowning dangers of his
administration, in the confidence of the people, the means of his safety
and their own. He has contrived to do it, and perhaps none of our
Presidents since Washington has stood so firm in the confidence of the
people as he does after three years of stormy administration.
(1) See *Revelation,* chapter 3, verse 15.
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