d of ignorance; a youth taking up the burden of coarse and heavy
labor; a man entering on the doubtful struggle of a local backwoods
career--these were the beginnings of Abraham Lincoln if we look at
them only in the hard practical spirit which takes for its motto that
"Nothing succeeds but success." If we adopt a more generous as well as a
truer view, then we see that it was the brave hopeful spirit, the strong
active mind, and the great law of moral growth that accepts the good and
rejects the bad, which Nature gave this obscure child, that carried
him to the service of mankind and the admiration of the centuries as
certainly as the acorn grows to be the oak.

Even his privations helped the end. Self-reliance, the strongest
trait of the pioneer was his by blood and birth and training, and was
developed by the hardships of his lot to the mighty power needed to
guide our country through the struggle of the Civil War.

The sense of equality was his also, for he grew from childhood to
manhood in a state of society where there were neither rich to envy nor
poor to despise, and where the gifts and hardships of the forest were
distributed without favor to each and all alike. In the forest he
learned charity, sympathy, helpfulness--in a word neighborliness--for in
that far-off frontier life all the wealth of India, had a man possessed
it, could not have bought relief from danger or help in time of need,
and neighborliness became of prime importance. Constant opportunity was
found there to practice the virtue which Christ declared to be next to
the love of God--to love one's neighbor as oneself.

In such settlements, far removed from courts and jails, men were brought
face to face with questions of natural right. The pioneers not only
understood the American doctrine of self-government--they lived it. It
was this understanding, this feeling, which taught Lincoln to write:
"When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when
he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than
self-government that is despotism;" and also to give utterance to its
twin truth: "He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave."

Lincoln was born in the slave State of Kentucky. He lived there only a
short time, and we have reason to believe that wherever he might have
grown up, his very nature would have spurned the doctrine and practice
of human slavery. Yet, though he hated slavery, he never hated the
slav