and convictions of an entire people. Autocracy may have something in
it more melodramatic than this, but falls far short of it in human
value and interest.

Experience would have bred in us a rooted distrust of improvised
statesmanship, even if we did not believe politics to be a science,
which, if it cannot always command men of special aptitude and great
powers, at least demands the long and steady application of the best
powers of such men as it can command to master even its first
principles. It is curious, that, in a country which boasts of its
intelligence, the theory should be so generally held that the most
complicated of human contrivances, and one which every day becomes
more complicated, can be worked at sight by any man able to talk for
an hour or two without stopping to think.

Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example of a ready-made ruler.
But no case could well be less in point; for, besides that he was a
man of such fair-mindedness as is always the raw material of wisdom,
he had in his profession a training precisely the opposite of that to
which a partisan is subjected. His experience as a lawyer compelled
him not only to see that there is a principle underlying every
phenomenon in human affairs, but that there are always two sides to
every question, both of which must be fully understood in order to
understand either, and that it is of greater advantage to an advocate
to appreciate the strength than the weakness of his antagonist's
position. Nothing is more remarkable than the unerring tact with
which, in his debate with Mr. Douglas, he went straight to the reason
of the question; nor have we ever had a more striking lesson in
political tactics than the fact, that, opposed to a man exceptionally
adroit in using popular prejudice and bigotry to his purpose,
exceptionally unscrupulous in appealing to those baser motives that
turn a meeting of citizens into a mob of barbarians, he should yet
have won his case before a jury of the people. Mr. Lincoln was as far
as possible from an impromptu politician. His wisdom was made up of a
knowledge of things as well as of men; his sagacity resulted from a
clear perception and honest acknowledgment of difficulties, which
enabled him to see that the only durable triumph of political opinion
is based, not on any abstract right, but upon so much of justice, the
highest attainable at any given moment in human affairs, as may be had
in the balance of mutual conce