Abraham Lincoln | Page 9

a clear perception and honest acknowledgment
of difficulties, which enabled him to see that the only durable triumph
of political opinion is based, not on any abstract right, but upon so
much of justice, the highest attainable at any given moment in human
affairs, as may be had in the balance of mutual concession. Doubtless
he had an ideal, but it was the ideal of a practical statesman,--to aim at
the best, and to take the next best, if he is lucky enough to get even that.
His slow, but singularly masculine, intelligence taught him that
precedent is only another name for embodied experience, and that it
counts for even more in the guidance of communities of men than in
that of the individual life. He was not a man who held it good public
economy to pull down on the mere chance of rebuilding better. Mr.
Lincoln's faith in God was qualified by a very well-founded distrust of
the wisdom of man. perhaps it was his want of self-confidence that
more than anything else won him the unlimited confidence of the
people, for they felt that there would be no need of retreat from any
position he had deliberately taken. The cautious, but steady, advance of

his policy during the war was like that of a Roman army. He left behind
him a firm road on which public confidence could follow; he took
America with him where he went; what he gained he occupied, and his
advanced posts became colonies. The very homeliness of his genius
was its distinction. His kingship was conspicuous by its workday
homespun. Never was ruler so absolute as he, nor so little conscious of
it; for he was the incarnate common-sense of the people. With all that
tenderness of nature whose sweet sadness touched whoever saw him
with something of its own pathos, there was no trace of sentimentalism
in his speech or action. He seems to have had one rule of conduct,
always that of practical and successful politics, to let himself be guided
by events, when they were sure to bring him out where he wished to go,
though by what seemed to unpractical minds, which let go the possible
to grasp at the desirable, a longer road.
Undoubtedly the highest function of statesmanship is by degrees to
accommodate the conduct of communities to ethical laws, and to
subordinate the conflicting self-interests of the day to higher and more
permanent concerns. But it is on the understanding, and not on the
sentiment, of a nation that all safe legislation must be based. Voltaire's
saying, that "a consideration of petty circumstances is the tomb of great
things," may be true of individual men, but it certainly is not true of
governments. It is by a multitude of such considerations, each in itself
trifling, but all together weighty, that the framers of policy can alone
divine what is practicable and therefore wise. The imputation of
inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest
thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and the dead
alone never change their opinion. The course of a great statesman
resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with
noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on
which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the
almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always aiming at
direct advances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven, and
sometimes bursting open paths of progress and fruitful human
commerce through what seem the eternal barriers of both. It is loyalty
to great ends, even though forced to combine the small and opposing
motives of selfish men to accomplish them; it is the anchored cling to
solid principles of duty and action, which knows how to swing with the

tide, but is never carried away by it,--that we demand in public men,
and not sameness of policy, or a conscientious persistency in what is
impracticable. For the impracticable, however theoretically enticing, is
always politically unwise, sound statesmanship being the application of
that prudence to the public business which is the safest guide in that of
private men.
No doubt slavery was the most delicate and embarrassing question with
which Mr. Lincoln was called on to deal, and it was one which no man
in his position, whatever his opinions, could evade; for, though he
might withstand the clamor of partisans, he must sooner or later yield
to the persistent importunacy of circumstances, which thrust the
problem upon him at every turn and in every shape.
It has been brought against us as an accusation abroad, and repeated
here by people who measure their country rather by what is thought of
it than by what is, that our war has not been distinctly and avowedly for
the extinction