e seemed to have chosen
Mazarin's motto, _Le temps et moi_. The _moi_, to be sure, was not
very prominent at first; but it has grown more and more so, till the
world is beginning to be persuaded that it stands for a character of
marked individuality and capacity for affairs. Time was his
prime-minister, and, we began to think, at one period, his
general-in-chief also. At first he was so slow that he tired out all
those who see no evidence of progress but in blowing up the engine;
then he was so fast, that he took the breath away from those who think
there is no getting on safely while there is a spark of fire under the
boilers. God is the only being who has time enough; but a prudent man,
who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as
much as he needs. Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his
career, though we have sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise,
has always waited, as a wise man should, till the right moment
brought up all his reserves. _Semper nocuit differre paratis_, is a
sound axiom, but the really efficacious man will also be sure to know
when he is not ready, and be firm against all persuasion and reproach
till he is.
One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms made on Mr.
Lincoln's course by those who mainly agree with him in principle, that
the chief object of a statesman should be rather to proclaim his
adhesion to certain doctrines, than to achieve their triumph by
quietly accomplishing his ends. In our opinion, there is no more
unsafe politician than a conscientiously rigid doctrinaire, nothing
more sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that
admits of no pliability for contingencies. True, there is a popular
image of an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the submissive
destinies of mankind become as wax, and to whose commanding necessity
the toughest facts yield with the graceful pliancy of fiction; but in
real life we commonly find that the men who control circumstances, as
it is called, are those who have learned to allow for the influence of
their eddies, and have the nerve to turn them to account at the happy
instant. Mr. Lincoln's perilous task has been to carry a rather shaky
raft through the rapids, making fast the unrulier logs as he could
snatch opportunity, and the country is to be congratulated that he did
not think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but cautiously
to assure himself with his setting-pole where
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