ed to them by the South, and
when Lincoln was by the course of events restored to active
participation in politics, he soon showed that he had reached the
highest of all objects of personal culture. While still remaining one of
a body of men who, all unconsciously, impoverished their minds in order
to increase the momentum of their practical energy, he none the less
achieved for himself a mutually helpful relation between a firm will and
a luminous intelligence. The training of his mind, the awakening of his
imagination, the formation of his taste and style, the humorous
dramatizing of his experience,--all this discipline had failed to
pervert his character, narrow his sympathies, or undermine his purposes.
His intelligence served to enlighten his will, and his will, to
establish the mature decisions of his intelligence. Late in life the two
faculties became in their exercise almost indistinguishable. His
judgments, in so far as they were decisive, were charged with momentum,
and his actions were instinct with sympathy and understanding.

Just because his actions were instinct with sympathy and understanding,
Lincoln was certainly the most humane statesman who ever guided a
nation through a great crisis. He always regarded other men and acted
towards them, not merely as the embodiment of an erroneous or harmful
idea, but as human beings, capable of better things; and consequently
all of his thoughts and actions looked in the direction of a higher
level of human association. It is this characteristic which makes him a
better and, be it hoped, a more prophetic democrat than any other
national American leader. His peculiar distinction does not consist in
the fact that he was a "Man of the People" who passed from the condition
of splitting rails to the condition of being President. No doubt he was
in this respect as good a democrat as you please, and no doubt it was
desirable that he should be this kind of a democrat. But many other
Americans could be named who were also men of the people, and who passed
from the most insignificant to the most honored positions in American
life. Lincoln's peculiar and permanent distinction as a democrat will
depend rather upon the fact that his thoughts and his actions looked
towards the realization of the highest and most edifying democratic
ideal. Whatever his theories were, he showed by his general outlook and
behavior that democracy meant to him more than anything else the spirit
and pr