imply brought forward
the proofs which fairly counted on his side, and left the decision to
others; and that he was so little attentive to gain that, although he
became one of the leading lawyers of Illinois, he never accumulated much
money.

His fairness as a lawyer, and his integrity in politics, won his popular
nickname of "Honest Abe." Perhaps honesty, in its fullest sense, was his
central quality. He was always true to the truth as he saw it--true in
thought and word and deed. One feels in his printed speeches that he is
trying to see and to say things as they are. He had not the aid of the
mystic's vision, in which the moral universe is revealed in such
splendor that to accept and obey it is pure joy. But he saw and felt and
practiced the homely obligations of honesty and kindness. His education
came largely as at successive epochs there were disclosed to him new
heights of moral significance in the life of the nation; and as fast as
such disclosures came to him he set himself to obey them with absolute
loyalty.

His conscience was not of the self-contemplating and self-voicing kind.
He was chary of words about duty. It has been alleged that the typical
New Englander is afflicted with "a chronic inflammation of the moral
sense." Such a malady does exist, though many a New Englander is bravely
free from it, while it is not unknown in Alaska or Japan. From such an
over-conscientious conscience, and from its incidents and its
counterfeits, there is bred a redundancy of verbal moralising. That was
not a foible of Lincoln. The sense of moral obligation underlies his
weightier utterances, as the law of gravitation underlies scientific
demonstrations,--not talked of, but assumed.

Lincoln's political career gave high promise at the start. He seemed to
have the qualities for success,--ambition, shrewdness in managing men,
power as a speaker, integrity which won general confidence, ideals not
too high above the crowd. Yet his success was so moderate that in
contrasting himself with Senator Douglas, at the outset of their debate
in 1858, he declared that, "With me the race of ambition has been a
failure,--a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success."
There were reasons for it: Douglas had given himself without reserve to
his personal advancement, and Lincoln had been hampered by regard for
other men and for larger ends. After one term in Congress as a Whig,
1847-8, he retired in deference to the fashion