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
but 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