e only under the influence of a political framework like our
own. We find it hard to understand how even a foreigner should be
blind to the grandeur of the combat of ideas that has been going on
here,--to the heroic energy, persistency, and self-reliance of a nation
proving that it knows how much dearer greatness is than mere power; and
we own that it is impossible for us to conceive the mental and moral
condition of the American who does not feel his spirit braced and
heightened by being even a spectator of such qualities and
achievements. That a steady purpose and a definite aim have been given
to the jarring forces which, at the beginning of the war, spent
themselves in the discussion of schemes which could only become
operative, if at all, after the war was over; that a popular excitement
has been slowly intensified into an earnest national will; that a
somewhat impracticable moral sentiment has been made the unconscious
instrument of a practical moral end; that the treason of covert
enemies, the jealousy of rivals, the unwise zeal of friends, have been
made not only useless for mischief, but even useful for good; that the
conscientious sensitiveness of England to the horrors of civil conflict
has been prevented from complicating a domestic with a foreign
war;--all these results, any one of which might suffice to prove
greatness in a ruler, have been mainly due to the good sense, the good
humor, the sagacity, the large-mindedness, and the unselfish honesty of
the unknown man whom a blind fortune, as it seemed, had lifted from the
crowd to the most dangerous and difficult eminence of modern times. It
is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of
a man is tested; it is by the sagacity to see, and the fearless honesty
to admit, whatever of truth there may be in an adverse opinion, in
order more convincingly to expose the fallacy that lurks behind it,
that a reasoner at length gains for his mere statement of a fact the
force of argument; it is by a wise forecast which allows hostile
combinations to go so far as by the inevitable reaction to become
elements of his own power, that a politician proves his genius for
statecraft; and especially it is by so gently guiding public sentiment
that he seems to follow it, by so yielding doubtful points that he can
be firm without seeming obstinate in essential ones, and thus gain the
advantages of compromise without the weakness of concession; by so
insti