ssion. Doubtless he had an ideal, but it
was the ideal of a practical statesman--to aim at the best, and to
take the next best, if he is lucky enough to get even that. His slow,
but singularly masculine intelligence taught him that precedent is
only another name for embodied experience, and that it counts for even
more in the guidance of communities of men than in that of the
individual life. He was not a man who held it good public economy to
pull down on the mere chance of rebuilding better. Mr. Lincoln's
faith in God was qualified by a very well-founded distrust of the
wisdom of man. Perhaps it was his want of self-confidence that more
than anything else won him the unlimited confidence of the people, for
they felt that there would be no need of retreat from any position he
had deliberately taken. The cautious, but steady, advance of his
policy during the war was like that of a Roman army. He left behind
him a firm road on which public confidence could follow; he took
America with him where he went; what he gained he occupied, and his
advanced posts became colonies. The very homeliness of his genius was
its distinction. His kingship was conspicuous by its work-day
homespun. Never was ruler so absolute as he, nor so little conscious
of it; for he was the incarnate common-sense of the people. With all
that tenderness of nature whose sweet sadness touched whoever saw him
with something of its own pathos, there was no trace of sentimentalism
in his speech or action. He seems to have had but one rule of conduct,
always that of practical and successful politics, to let himself be
guided by events, when they were sure to bring him out where he wished
to go, though by what seemed to unpractical minds, which let go the
possible to grasp at the desirable, a longer road.

* * * * *

No higher compliment was ever paid to a nation than the simple
confidence, the fireside plainness, with which Mr. Lincoln always
addresses himself to the reason of the American people. This was,
indeed, a true democrat, who grounded himself on the assumption that a
democracy can think. "Come, let us reason together about this matter,"
has been the tone of all his addresses to the people; and accordingly
we have never had a chief magistrate who so won to himself the love
and at the same time the judgment of his countrymen. To us, that
simple confidence of his in the right-mindedness of his fellow-men is
very touching,