of blundering and hesitation about details--first,
that upon questions like these he was free from ambiguity of thought or
faltering of will, and further, that upon his difficult path, amid
bewildering and terrifying circumstances, he was able to take with him
the minds of very many very ordinary men.

In a slightly conventional memorial oration upon Clay, Lincoln had said
of him that "he loved his country, partly because it was his own
country, and mostly because it was a free country." He might truly
have said the like of himself. To him the national unity of America,
with the Constitution which symbolised it, was the subject of pride and
of devotion just in so far as it had embodied and could hereafter more
fully embody certain principles of permanent value to mankind. On this
he fully knew his own inner mind. For the preservation of an America
which he could value more, say, than men value the Argentine Republic,
he was to show himself better prepared than any other man to pay any
possible price. But he definitely refused to preserve the Union by
what in his estimation would have been the real surrender of the
principles which had made Americans a distinct and self-respecting
nation.

Those principles he found in the Declaration of Independence. Its
rhetorical inexactitude gave him no trouble, and must not, now that its
language is out of fashion, blind us to the fact that the founders of
the United States did deliberately aspire to found a commonwealth in
which common men and women should count for more than elsewhere, and in
which, as we might now phrase it, all authority must defer somewhat to
the interests and to the sentiments of the under dog. "Public opinion
on any subject," he said, "always has a 'central idea' from which all
its minor thoughts radiate. The 'central idea' in our public opinion
at the beginning was, and till recently has continued to be, 'the
equality of man'; and, although it has always submitted patiently to
whatever inequality seemed to be a matter of actual necessity, its
constant working has been a steady and progressive effort towards the
practical equality of all men." The fathers, he said again, had never
intended any such obvious untruth as that equality actually existed, or
that any action of theirs could immediately create it; but they had set
up a standard to which continual approximation could be made.

So far as white men were concerned such approximation had actuall