Abraham Lincoln | Page 8

she took
her place again as a planet of the first magnitude in the European
system. In one respect Mr. Lincoln was more fortunate than Henry.
However some may think him wanting in zeal, the most fanatical can
find no taint of apostasy in any measure of his, nor can the most bitter
charge him with being influenced by motives of personal interest. The
leading distinction between the policies of the two is one of
circumstances. Henry went over to the nation; Mr. Lincoln has steadily
drawn the nation over to him. One left a united France; the other, we
hope and believe, will leave a reunited America. We leave our readers
to trace the further points of difference and resemblance for themselves,

merely suggesting a general similarity which has often occurred to us.
One only point of melancholy interest we will allow ourselves to touch
upon. That Mr. Lincoln is not handsome nor elegant, we learn from
certain English tourists who would consider similar revelations in
regard to Queen Victoria as thoroughly American in the want of
*bienseance.* It is no concern of ours, nor does it affect his fitness for
the high place he so worthily occupies; but he is certainly as fortunate
as Henry in the matter of good looks, if we may trust contemporary
evidence. Mr. Lincoln has also been reproached with Americanism by
some not unfriendly British critics; but, with all deference, we cannot
say that we like him any the worse for it, or see in it any reason why he
should govern Americans the less wisely.
(1) One of Henry's titles was Prince of Bearn, that being the old
province of France from which he came.
People of more sensitive organizations may be shocked, but we are
glad that in this our true war of independence, which is to free us
forever from the Old World, we have had at the head of our affairs a
man whom America made, as God made Adam, out of the very earth,
unancestried, unprivileged, unknown, to show us how much truth, how
much magnanimity, and how much statecraft await the call of
opportunity in simple manhood when it believes in the justice of God
and the worth of man. Conventionalities are all very well in their
proper place, but they shrivel at the touch of nature like stubble in the
fire. The genius that sways a nation by its arbitrary will seems less
august to us than that which multiplies and reinforces itself in the
instincts and convictions of an entire people. Autocracy may have
something in it more melodramatic than this, but falls far short of it in
human value and interest.
Experience would have bred in us a rooted distrust of improved
statesmanship, even if we did not believe politics to be a science, which,
if it cannot always command men of special aptitude and great powers,
at least demands the long and steady application of the best powers of
such men as it can command to master even its first principles. It is
curious, that, in a country which boasts of its intelligence the theory
should be so generally held that the most complicated of human
contrivances, and one which every day becomes more complicated, can
be worked at sight by any man able to talk for an hour or two without

stopping to think.
Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example of a ready-made ruler.
But no case could well be less in point; for, besides that he was a man
of such fair-mindedness as is always the raw material of wisdom, he
had in his profession a training precisely the opposite of that to which a
partisan is subjected. His experience as a lawyer compelled him not
only to see that there is a principle underlying every phenomenon in
human affairs, but that there are always two sides to every question,
both of which must be fully understood in order to understand either,
and that it is of greater advantage to an advocate to appreciate the
strength than the weakness of his antagonist's position. Nothing is more
remarkable than the unerring tact with which, in his debate with Mr.
Douglas, he went straight to the reason of the question; nor have we
ever had a more striking lesson in political tactics than the fact, that
opposed to a man exceptionally adroit in using popular prejudice and
bigotry to his purpose, exceptionally unscrupulous in appealing to those
baser motives that turn a meeting of citizens into a mob of barbarians,
he should yet have won his case before a jury of the people. Mr.
Lincoln was as far as possible from an impromptu politician. His
wisdom was made up of a knowledge of things as well as of men; his
sagacity resulted from