t and obstinate
thoughts, monotonous like the desert, and growing up among those
primeval forests, which, with their fragrance, send a cloud of incense,
and, with their murmurs, a cloud of prayers to heaven; a boatman at
eight years in the impetuous current of the Ohio, and at seventeen in
the vast and tranquil waters of the Mississippi; later, a woodman, with
axe and arm felling the immemorial trees, to open a way to unexplored
regions for his tribe of wandering workers; reading no other book than
the Bible, the book of great sorrows and great hopes, dictated often by
prophets to the sound of fetters they dragged through Nineveh and
Babylon; a child of Nature; in a word, by one of those miracles only
comprehensible among free peoples, he fought for the country, and was
raised by his fellow-citizens to the Congress at Washington, and by the
nation to the Presidency of the Republic; and when the evil grew more
virulent, when those States were dissolved, when the slave-holders
uttered their war-cry and the slaves their groans of despair, humblest
of the humble before his conscience, greatest of the great before
history, ascends the Capitol, the greatest moral height of our time, and
strong and serene with his conscience and his thought; before him a
veteran army, hostile Europe behind him, England favoring the South,
France encouraging reaction in Mexico, in his hands the riven country;
he arms two millions of men, gathers half a million of horses, sends his
artillery twelve hundred miles in a week, from the banks of the Potomac
to the shores of the Tennessee; fights more than six hundred battles;
renews before Richmond the deeds of Alexander, of Caesar; and, after
having emancipated three million slaves, that nothing might be wanting,
he dies in the very moment of victory--like Christ, like Socrates, like
all redeemers, at the foot of his work. His work! sublime achievement!
over which humanity shall eternally shed its tears, and God his
benedictions!

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

JAMES A. GARFIELD

In the great drama of the rebellion there were two acts. The first was
the war, with its battles and sieges, its victories and defeats, its
sufferings and tears. Just as the curtain was lifting on the second and
final act, the restoration of peace and liberty, the evil spirit of the
rebellion, in the fury of despair, nerved and directed the hand of an
assassin to strike down the chief character in both. It was no one man
who