es of Illinois farmers who wished
to hear national issues made clear to them, then to a listening nation
in the agony of civil war, and ultimately to a world which looks to
Lincoln as an exponent and interpreter of the essence of democracy.

As the audience increased, the style took on beauty and breadth, as
if the man's soul were looking through wider and wider windows at the
world. But it always remained the simplest of styles. In an offhand
reply to a serenade by an Indiana regiment, or in answering a visiting
deputation of clergymen at the White House, Lincoln could summarize and
clarify a complicated national situation with an ease and orderliness
and fascination that are the despair of professional historians. He
never wasted a word. "Go to work is the only cure for your case," he
wrote to John D. Johnston. There are ten words in that sentence and none
of over four letters. The "Gettysburg Address" contains but two hundred
and seventy words, in ten sentences. "It is a flat failure," said
Lincoln despondently; but Edward Everett, who had delivered "the"
oration of that day, wrote to the President: "I should be glad if I
could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the
occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes." Today the "Address"
reads as if Lincoln knew that it would ultimately be stamped in bronze.

Yet the real test of Lincoln's supremacy in our distinctly civic
literature lies not so much in his skill in the manipulation of
language, consummate as that was, but rather in those large elements of
his nature which enabled him to perceive the true quality and ideal
of American citizenship and its significance to the world. There was
melancholy in that nature, else there had been a less rich humor; there
was mysticism and a sense of religion which steadily deepened as his
responsibilities increased. There was friendliness, magnanimity, pity
for the sorrowful, patience for the slow of brain and heart, and an
expectation for the future of humanity which may best be described in
the old phrase "waiting for the Kingdom of God." His recurrent dream of
the ship coming into port under full sail, which preluded many
important events in his own life--he had it the night before he was
assassinated--is significant not only of that triumph of a free nation
which he helped to make possible, but also of the victory of what he
loved to call "the whole family of man." "That is the real issue," he
had decl