id see. He
lived in closest contact with ordinary men and knew them thoroughly. His
training was as a lawyer and a politician. This brought him in touch
with the every-day actuality and all its hard and mean facts. He was
disciplined in that attempt to reach justice under a code of laws which
is the practical administration of society, distinct from the idealist's
vision of perfection.

The time came when in the new birth of politics he rose to the perception
of a great moral principle,--the nation's duty toward slavery. At the
same time, his ambition again saw its opportunity. He had a strong man's
love of power, but he deliberately subordinated his personal success to
his convictions when he risked and lost the fight with Douglas for the
senatorship by the "house-divided-against-itself" speech.

In the anxious interval between his election and inauguration, he went
through, as he said long afterward, "a process of crystallization,"--a
religious consecration. He made no talk about it, but all his words and
acts thenceforth show a selfless, devoted temper.

He bore incalculable burdens and perplexities for the sake of the people.
He met the vast complication of forces which mix in politics and war--the
selfishness, hatred, meanness, triviality, along with the higher
elements--with the rarest union of shrewdness, flexibility, and
steadfastness. His humor saved him from being crushed. The atmosphere
he lived in permitted no illusions. "Politics," said he, "is the art of
combining individual meannesses for the general good."

He came to the sense of a divine purpose in which he had a part. He grew
in charity, in sympathy, in wisdom. His private griefs, such as the
death of his boy, deepened his nature. He bore burdens beyond
Hamlet's,--a temperament prone to melancholy, the death of the woman he
loved, a wife who was little comfort, an ambition which long found no
fruition and no adequate field, a baffled gaze into life's mystery; then
the responsibility of a nation in its supreme crisis, and the sense of
the nation's woe. Through it all he held fast the clew of moral fidelity.

A lover of peace, he was forced to be captain in a terrible war. "You
know me, Voorhees," he said to an old friend; "I can't bear to cut off
the head of a chicken, and here I stand among rivers of blood!"

Under overwhelming perplexities and responsibilities, amid a ceaseless
drain on his sympathies, he learned and practiced a h