but enshrining
hard fact, will prove to them that this great feature of his policy was
a matter of more than policy. They will remember it as adding a
peculiar lustre to the renovation of their national existence; as no
small part of the glory, surpassing that of former wars, which has
become the common heritage of North and South. For perhaps not many
conquerors, and certainly few successful statesmen, have escaped the
tendency of power to harden or at least to narrow their human
sympathies; but in this man a natural wealth of tender compassion
became richer and more tender while in the stress of deadly conflict he
developed an astounding strength.

Beyond his own country some of us recall his name as the greatest among
those associated with the cause of popular government. He would have
liked this tribute, and the element of truth in it is plain enough, yet
it demands one final consideration. He accepted the institutions to
which he was born, and he enjoyed them. His own intense experience of
the weakness of democracy did not sour him, nor would any similar
experience of later times have been likely to do so. Yet if he
reflected much on forms of government it was with a dominant interest
in something beyond them. For he was a citizen of that far country
where there is neither aristocrat nor democrat. No political theory
stands out from his words or actions; but they show a most unusual
sense of the possible dignity of common men and common things. His
humour rioted in comparisons between potent personages and Jim Jett's
brother or old Judge Brown's drunken coachman, for the reason for which
the rarely jesting Wordsworth found a hero in the "Leech-Gatherer" or
in Nelson and a villain in Napoleon or in Peter Bell. He could use and
respect and pardon and overrule his far more accomplished ministers
because he stood up to them with no more fear or cringing, with no more
dislike or envy or disrespect than he had felt when he stood up long
before to Jack Armstrong. He faced the difficulties and terrors of his
high office with that same mind with which he had paid his way as a
poor man or navigated a boat in rapids or in floods. If he had a
theory of democracy it was contained in this condensed note which he
wrote, perhaps as an autograph, a year or two before his Presidency:
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses
my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent o