ulsations and
the hurricane of public life. Thus Mr. Lincoln's friends assert that
all his efforts tend to conciliate parties and even individuals. This
candor was beneficial and efficient in the court or bar-rooms, or
around a supper table in Springfield. It was even more so, perhaps,
when seasoned with stories more or less * * * But one who tries to
conciliate between two antipodic principles, or between pure and
impure characters, unavoidably must dodge the principal points at
issue. Such is the stern law of logic. Who dodges, who biasses,
unavoidably deviates from that straight and direct way at the end of
which dwells truth. Further: feeble, expectative and vacillating
minds, deprived of the faculty to embrace in all its depth and
extension the task before them,--such minds cannot have a clear
purpose, nor the firm perception of ways and means leading to the aim,
and still less have they the sternness of conviction so necessary for
men dealing with such mighty events, on which depend the life and
death of a society. Such men hesitate, postpone, bias and deviate from
the straight way. Such men believe themselves in the way to truth,
when they are aside of it. It results therefrom, that when certain
amiable qualities, such as conciliation, a little dodging, hesitation,
etc., are practised in private life and in a very restrained area,
their deviations from truth are altogether imperceptible, and they are
then positive good qualities, nay, virtues. But such qualities,
transported and put into daily friction with the tempestuous
atmosphere of human events, lose their ingenuousness, their innocence,
their good-naturedness; the imperceptibility of their intrinsic
deviation becomes transparent and of gigantic dimensions.

Mr. Lincoln's crystal-pure integrity prevented not the most frightful
dilapidation, nay, robbing of the treasury by contractors, etc., etc.
Nor has it kept pure his official household. His friend Lamon and the
to-be-formed regiments; the splendid equipages and _coupes_ of his
youthful secretaries, to be sure, came not from Springfield, etc.,
etc., nor sees he through the rascally scheme of the Chiriqui
colonization.

Mr. Lincoln, his friends assert, does not wish to hurt the feelings of
any one with whom he has to deal. Exceedingly amiable quality in a
private individual, but at times turning almost to be a vice in a man
entrusted with the destinies of a nation. So he never could decide to
hurt the fe