t in the corner grocery
store, where he could sit with his feet on the stove swapping stories
with his friends; and if an English traveler of 1850 had happened in on
the group, he would most assuredly have discovered another instance of
the distressing vulgarity to which the absence of an hereditary
aristocracy and an established church condemned the American democracy.
Thus no man could apparently have been more the average product of his
day and generation. Nevertheless, at bottom, Abraham Lincoln differed as
essentially from the ordinary Western American of the Middle Period as
St. Francis of Assisi differed from the ordinary Benedictine monk of the
thirteenth century.

The average Western American of Lincoln's generation was fundamentally a
man who subordinated his intelligence to certain dominant practical
interests and purposes. He was far from being a stupid or slow-witted
man. On the contrary, his wits had been sharpened by the traffic of
American politics and business, and his mind was shrewd, flexible, and
alert. But he was wholly incapable either of disinterested or of
concentrated intellectual exertion. His energies were bent in the
conquest of certain stubborn external forces, and he used his
intelligence almost exclusively to this end. The struggles, the
hardships, and the necessary self-denial of pioneer life constituted an
admirable training of the will. It developed a body of men with great
resolution of purpose and with great ingenuity and fertility in
adapting their insufficient means to the realization of their important
business affairs. But their almost exclusive preoccupation with
practical tasks and their failure to grant their intelligence any room
for independent exercise bent them into exceedingly warped and one-sided
human beings.

Lincoln, on the contrary, much as he was a man of his own time and
people, was precisely an example of high and disinterested intellectual
culture. During all the formative years in which his life did not
superficially differ from that of his associates, he was in point of
fact using every chance which the material of Western life afforded to
discipline and inform his mind. These materials were not very abundant;
and in the use which he proceeded to make of them Lincoln had no
assistance, either from a sound tradition or from a better educated
master. On the contrary, as the history of the times shows, there was
every temptation for a man with a strong intellectu