y have been rewarded with such abundant
appreciation that it may seem superfluous to insist upon them once
again; but I believe that from the point of view of this book an even
higher value may be placed, if not upon his patriotic service, at least
upon his personal worth. The Union might well have been saved and
slavery extinguished without his assistance; but the life of no other
American has revealed with anything like the same completeness the
peculiar moral promise of genuine democracy. He shows us by the full but
unconscious integrity of his example the kind of human excellence which
a political and social democracy may and should fashion; and its most
grateful and hopeful aspect is, not merely that there is something
partially American about the manner of his excellence, but that it can
be fairly compared with the classic types of consummate personal
distinction.

To all appearance nobody could have been more than Abraham Lincoln a man
of his own time and place. Until 1858 his outer life ran much in the
same groove as that of hundreds of other Western politicians and
lawyers. Beginning as a poor and ignorant boy, even less provided with
props and stepping-stones than were his associates, he had worked his
way to a position of ordinary professional and political distinction. He
was not, like Douglas, a brilliant success. He was not, like Grant, an
apparently hopeless failure. He had achieved as much and as little as
hundreds of others had achieved. He was respected by his neighbors as
an honest man and as a competent lawyer. They credited him with
ability, but not to any extraordinary extent. No one would have pointed
him out as a remarkable and distinguished man. He had shown himself to
be desirous of recognition and influence; but ambition had not been the
compelling motive in his life. In most respects his ideas, interests,
and standards were precisely the same as those of his associates. He
accepted with them the fabric of traditional American political thought
and the ordinary standards of contemporary political morality. He had
none of the moral strenuousness of the reformer, none of the
exclusiveness of a man, whose purposes and ideas were consciously
perched higher than those of his neighbors. Probably the majority of his
more successful associates classed him as a good and able man who was
somewhat lacking in ambition and had too much of a disposition to loaf.
He was most at home, not in his own house, bu