you
cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer.
Choose some other occupation, rather than one in the choosing of which
you do, in advance, consent to be a knave."

While Lincoln thus became a lawyer, he did not cease to remain a
politician. In the early West, law and politics were parallel roads to
usefulness as well as distinction. Newspapers had not then reached any
considerable circulation. There existed neither fast presses to print
them, mail routes to carry them, nor subscribers to read them. Since
even the laws had to be newly framed for those new communities, the
lawyer became the inevitable political instructor and guide as far as
ability and fame extended. His reputation as a lawyer was a twin of his
influence as an orator, whether through logic or eloquence. Local
conditions fostered, almost necessitated, this double pursuit. Westward
emigration was in its full tide, and population was pouring into the
great State of Illinois with ever accelerating rapidity. Settlements
were spreading, roads were being opened, towns laid out, the larger
counties divided and new ones organized, and the enthusiastic visions of
coming prosperity threw the State into that fever of speculation which
culminated in wholesale internal improvements on borrowed capital and
brought collapse, stagnation, and bankruptcy in its inevitable train. As
already said, these swift changes required a plentiful supply of new
laws, to frame which lawyers were in a large proportion sent to the
legislature every two years. These same lawyers also filled the bar and
recruited the bench of the new State, and, as they followed the
itinerant circuit courts from county to county in their various
sections, were called upon in these summer wanderings to explain in
public speeches their legislative work of the winter. By a natural
connection, this also involved a discussion of national and party
issues. It was also during this period that party activity was
stimulated by the general adoption of the new system of party caucuses
and party conventions to which President Jackson had given the impulse.

In the American system of representative government, elections not only
occur with the regularity of clockwork, but pervade the whole organism
in every degree of its structure from top to bottom--Federal, State,
county, township, and school district. In Illinois, even the State
judiciary has at different times been chosen by popular ba