On the one hand,
it is certain that Lincoln trained himself to be a great student of the
fitting opportunity. He evidently paid very serious attention to the
counsels of friends who would check his rasher impulses. One of his
closest associates insists that his impulsive judgment was bad, and he
probably thought so himself. It will be seen later that the most
momentous utterance he ever made was kept back through the whole space
of two years of crisis at the instance of timid friends. It required
not less courage and was certainly more effective when at last it did
come out. The same great capacity for waiting marks any steps that he
took for his own advancement. Indeed it was a happy thing for him and
for his country that his character and the whole cast of his ideas and
sympathies were of a kind to which the restraint imposed on an American
politician was most congenial and to which therefore it could do least
harm. He was to prove himself a patient man in other ways as well as
this. On many things, perhaps on most, the thoughts he worked out in
his own mind diverged very widely from those of his neighbours, but he
was not in the least anxious either to conceal or to obtrude them. His
social philosophy as he expressed it to his friends in these days was
one which contemplated great future reforms--abolition of slavery and a
strict temperance policy were among them. But he looked for them with
a sort of fatalistic confidence in the ultimate victory of reason, and
saw no use and a good deal of harm in premature political agitation for
them. "All such questions," he is reported to have said, "must find
lodgment with the most enlightened souls who stamp them with their
approval. In God's own time they will be organised into law and thus
woven into the fabric of our institutions." This seems a little
cold-blooded, but perhaps we can already begin to recognise the man
who, when the time had fully come, would be on the right side, and in
whom the evil which he had deeply but restrainedly hated would find an
appallingly wary foe.

But there were crucial instances which test sufficiently whether this
wary politician was a true man or not. The soil of Illinois was free
soil by the Ordinance of 1787, and Congress would only admit it to the
Union as a free State. But it had been largely peopled from the South.
There had been much agitation against this restriction; prevailing
sentiment to a late date strongly appr