Modern American Prose Selections | Page 4

the practical man's hard common sense
and willingness to adapt means to ends; but there was in him none of
that morbid growth of mind and soul which blinds so many practical
men to the higher aims of life. No more practical man ever lived than
this homely backwoods idealist; but he had nothing in common with
those practical men whose consciences are warped until they fail to
distinguish between good and evil, fail to understand that strength,
ability, shrewdness, whether in the world of business or of politics,
only serve to make their possessor a more noxious, a more evil,
member of the community if they are not guided and controlled by a
fine and high moral sense.
We of this day must try to solve many social and industrial problems,
requiring to an especial degree the combination of indomitable
resolution with cool-headed sanity. We can profit by the way in which
Lincoln used both these traits as he strove for reform. We can learn
much of value from the very attacks which following that course
brought upon his head, attacks alike by the extremists of revolution and
by the extremists of reaction. He never wavered in devotion to his
principles, in his love for the Union, and in his abhorrence of slavery.

Timid and lukewarm people were always denouncing him because he
was too extreme; but as a matter of fact he never went to extremes, he
worked step by step; and because of this the extremists hated and
denounced him with a fervor which now seems to us fantastic in its
deification of the unreal and the impossible. At the very time when one
side was holding him up as the apostle of social revolution because he
was against slavery, the leading abolitionist denounced him as the
"slave hound of Illinois." When he was the second time candidate for
President, the majority of his opponents attacked him because of what
they termed his extreme radicalism, while a minority threatened to bolt
his nomination because he was not radical enough. He had continually
to check those who wished to go forward too fast, at the very time that
he overrode the opposition of those who wished not to go forward at all.
The goal was never dim before his vision; but he picked his way
cautiously, without either halt or hurry, as he strode toward it, through
such a morass of difficulty that no man of less courage would have
attempted it, while it would surely have overwhelmed any man of
judgment less serene.
Yet perhaps the most wonderful thing of all, and, from the standpoint
of the America of to-day and of the future, the most vitally important,
was the extraordinary way in which Lincoln could fight valiantly
against what he deemed wrong and yet preserve undiminished his love
and respect for the brother from whom he differed. In the hour of a
triumph that would have turned any weaker man's head, in the heat of a
struggle which spurred many a good man to dreadful vindictiveness, he
said truthfully that so long as he had been in his office he had never
willingly planted a thorn in any man's bosom, and besought his
supporters to study the incidents of the trial through which they were
passing as philosophy from which to learn wisdom and not as wrongs
to be avenged; ending with the solemn exhortation that, as the strife
was over, all should reunite in a common effort to save their common
country.
He lived in days that were great and terrible, when brother fought
against brother for what each sincerely deemed to be the right. In a
contest so grim the strong men who alone can carry it through are

rarely able to do justice to the deep convictions of those with whom
they grapple in mortal strife. At such times men see through a glass
darkly; to only the rarest and loftiest spirits is vouchsafed that clear
vision which gradually comes to all, even the lesser, as the struggle
fades into distance, and wounds are forgotten, and peace creeps back to
the hearts that were hurt.
But to Lincoln was given this supreme vision. He did not hate the man
from whom he differed. Weakness was as foreign as wickedness to his
strong, gentle nature; but his courage was of a quality so high that it
needed no bolstering of dark passion. He saw clearly that the same high
qualities, the same courage, and willingness for self-sacrifice, and
devotion to the right as it was given them to see the right, belonged
both to the men of the North and to the men of the South. As the years
roll by, and as all of us, wherever we dwell, grow to feel an equal pride
in