r its effect
rather on the moral sense than the understanding. Their arguments were
drawn, not so much from experience as from general principles of right
and wrong. When the war came, their system continued to be applicable
and effective, for here again the reason of the people was to be
reached and kindled through their sentiments. It was one of those
periods of excitement, gathering, contagious, universal, which, while
they last, exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving to the mere words
_country, human rights, democracy_, a meaning and a force beyond that
of sober and logical argument. They were convictions, maintained and
defended by the supreme logic of passion. That penetrating fire ran in
and roused those primary instincts that make their lair in the dens and
caverns of the mind. What is called the great popular heart was
awakened, that indefinable something which may be, according to
circumstances, the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But
enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into anything better
than cant,--and phrases, when once the inspiration that filled them
with beneficent power has ebbed away, retain only that semblance of
meaning which enables them to supplant reason in hasty minds. Among
the lessons taught by the French Revolution there is none sadder or
more striking than this, that you may make everything else out of the
passions of men except a political system that will work, and that
there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity
formulated into dogma. It is always demoralizing to extend the domain
of sentiment over questions where it has no legitimate jurisdiction;
and perhaps the severest strain upon Mr. Lincoln was in resisting a
tendency of his own supporters which chimed with his own private
desires, while wholly opposed to his convictions of what would be wise
policy.

The change which three years have brought about is too remarkable to be
passed over without comment, too weighty in its lesson not to be laid
to heart. Never did a President enter upon office with less means at
his command, outside his own strength of heart and steadiness of
understanding, for inspiring confidence in the people, and so winning
it for himself, than Mr. Lincoln. All that was known of him was that
he was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his _availability_,--that
is, because he had no history,--and chosen by a party with whose more
extreme opinions he was