popular government that the truths those facts taught him had become
like the truths of mathematics in their clearness, their breadth, and
their precision.

The speeches on Slavery read strange to us now, when slavery as a living
system has been dead for forty years, dead and buried hell deep under
the detestation of mankind. It is hard for those whose memory does not
go back to 1865 to realize that down till then it was not only a
terrible fact, but was defended--defended by many otherwise good men,
defended not only by pseudo-scientific anthropologists as being in the
order of nature, but by ministers of the Gospel, out of the sacred
Scriptures, as part of the ordinances of God. Lincoln's position, the
position of one who had to induce slave-owning fellow-citizens to listen
to him and admit persuasion into their heated and prejudiced minds, did
not allow him to denounce it with horror, as we can all so easily do
to-day. But though his language is calm and restrained, he never
condescends to palter with slavery. He shows its innate evils and
dangers with unanswerable force. The speech on the Dred Scott decision
is a lucid, close and cogent piece of reasoning which, in its wide view
of Constitutional issues, sometimes reminds one of Webster, sometimes
even of Burke, though it does not equal the former in weight nor the
latter in splendour of diction.

Among the letters, perhaps the most impressive is that written to Mrs.
Bixley, the mother of five sons who had died fighting for the Union in
the armies of the North. It is short, and it deals with a theme on which
hundreds of letters are written daily. But I do not know where the
nobility of self-sacrifice for a great cause, and of the consolation
which the thought of a sacrifice so made should bring, is set forth with
such simple and pathetic beauty. Deep must be the fountains from which
there issues so pure a stream.

The career of Lincoln is often held up to ambitious young Americans as
an example to show what a man may achieve by his native strength, with
no advantages of birth or environment or education. In this there is
nothing improper, nothing fanciful. The moral is one which may well be
drawn, and in which those on whose early life Fortune has not smiled may
find encouragement. But the example is, after all, no great
encouragement to ordinary men, for Lincoln was an extraordinary man.

He triumphed over the adverse conditions of his early years because
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