incoln has already proclaimed an amnesty wide enough to satisfy the
demands of the most exacting humanity, and they must reckon on a
singular stupidity in their hearers who impute ferocious designs to a
man who cannot nerve his mind to the shooting of a deserter or the
hanging of a spy. Mr. Lincoln, in our judgment, has shown from the
first the considerate wisdom of a practical statesman. If he has been
sometimes slow in making up his mind, it has saved him the necessity of
being hasty to change it when once made up, and he has waited till the
gradual movement of the popular sentiment should help him to his
conclusions and sustain him in them. To be moderate and unimpassioned
in revolutionary times that kindle natures of more flimsy texture to a
blaze may not be a romantic quality, but it is a rare one, and goes
with those massive understandings on which a solid structure of
achievement may be reared. Mr. Lincoln is a long-headed and
long-purposed man, who knows when he is ready,--a secret General
McClellan never learned. That he should be accused of playing Cromwell
by the Opposition, and reproached with not being Cromwellian enough by
the more ardent of his own supporters, is proof enough that his action
has been of that firm but deliberate temper best suited to troublous
times and to constitutional precedents. One of these accusations is the
unworthy fetch of a party at a loss for argument, and the other springs
from that exaggerated notion of the power of some exceptional
characters upon events which Carlyle has made fashionable, but which
was never even approximately true except in times when there was no
such thing as public opinion, and of which there is no record personal
enough to assure us what we are to believe. A more sincere man than
Cromwell never lived, yet they know little of his history who do not
know that his policy was forced to trim between Independents and
Presbyterians, and that he so far healed the wounds of civil war as to
make England dreaded without satisfying either. We have seen no reason
to change our opinion of Mr. Lincoln since his wary scrupulousness won
him the applause of one party, or his decided action, when he was at
last convinced of its necessity, made him the momentary idol of the
other. We will not call him a great man, for over-hasty praise is too
apt to sour at last into satire, and greatness may be trusted safely to
history and the future; but an honest one we believe him to be