BOOKS.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.*

WHEN James Russell Lowell, in a patriotic threnody over the corpse of Abraham Lincoln, called him "the first American," it might at first sight appear that he was somewhat abusing the free licence accorded to poets by the common consent of the world. Vixen fortes ante Agamemnona. Nevertheless, the description was in a sense not only felicitous from a literary, but also accurate from an historical, point of view. If Lincoln was not the first great American, he was certainly the first and the greatest son of that new America which was reborn after the accursed taint of slavery had been erased from the escutcheon of the mighty Republic, and the nightmare of dissolu- tion, which had for three-quarters of a century weighed heavily on the political creation of Washington, was finally dispelled.

The personal factor must always count for much in the government of human beings, but the world has not yet discovered any certain method by which the relative merits of the individuals to whom power can wisely be entrusted can be tested. There is, in fact, only one possible test. It is that of actual experience, and this test can only be applied after the results of the experiment have become patent to all the world. Absolute power, bequeathed as an hereditary prerogative from sire to son, has been weighed in the balance and found wanting, partly because there is no sure guarantee that hereditary qualities are transmissible, and partly because, as in the case of the Hohenzollerns, they are some- times unworthy of being transmitted. Mr. Fortescue and other

• Personal Recollections of Abraham Linciobi. By Henry B. Rankin. Loudon: Q. P. Putnam:a Som. 1103. Od. Dot.]

historians have drawn attention to the fact that the European chaos produced by the French Revolution was in some measure due to the abundance of half-witted or incapable Sovereigns who, during the eighteenth century, governed their respective countries. The Emperor Paul of Russia was a madman. King Christian VII. of Denmark was subject to intermittent attacks of dementia, as also was George III. of England. Queen Marie of Portugal and Gustavus IV. of Sweden were both lunatics. Charles IV. of Spain and his brother, Ferdinand of Naples, were half-witted. Louis XVI. of France, Victor Amadeus of Sardinia, Francis of Austria, and Frederick William of Prussia, though not of unsound mind, were all wholly unfit to occupy with advantage to their countries the exalted positions which they held.

The defects of democracy, though of a different order, are no less striking. We see every day, in the working of our own institutions, which are devised in order, so far as is possible, to secure the merits and to avoid the demerits of rival and antagonistic systems, that indi- viduals, such as the late Secretary for Ireland, are at times appointed to high positions without any reference to the qualifications they possess for filling those positions to the advantage of the national interests. Moreover, when, on the occasion of a General Election, the people have to choose their temporary rulers, their motives are, in normal times, mixed to the verge of distraction. The conservative instincts of the British public have, up to tho present time, led them to reject the occasional application of the system known as the Referendum, which would to some extent mitigate the evils arising from this special cause. Even in abnormal times, such as those in which we now live, one of the main arguments against holding a General Election is the difficulty of focussing the mind of the nation on one point of supreme importance to the neglect of all collateral issues. We know that, although success in the war would be the question predominating in the minds of most of the electors, other homes, such as the Government of Ireland, Welsh Disestablishment, and possibly Female Suffrage, would, of a surety, intrude themselves and influence many voters.

Nevertheless, democracy, in spite of all its uncertainty and unrelia- bility, even although it be storm-tossed and riven asunder by conflicting passions, is capable at times of rising to a great occasion, of grasping the main issue which it has to decide, and of authoritatively placing at the helm the man most fitted to steer the ship of State. It may be scored to the eternal credit of democratic institutions that when, in the middle of the last century, the venerable but vacillating figure of Buchanan disappeared from the political stage of America, the citizens of the Northern States at once realized that a time had arrived when their existence as a united nation was at stake, and that a supreme effort was required to shake off once and for all time the disintegrating theories of government of which in the past Calhoun had been the principal exponent. With this resolve firmly embedded in their minds, and being guided more by instinct than by any certain proofs of competency, they had the great good fortune to put the right man in the right place. That man was Abraham Lincoln.

What were the title-deeds which justified his candidature to occupy a post which in all but name was kingly ? They did not at first sight appear very conclusive as to his merits, but they were of a nature emi- nently calculated to appeal to the imagination of a people whose apparent materialism is tempered by high ideals and a strong undercurrent of lofty morality. Lincoln came of no illustrious or even distinguished stock. His father was a carpenter and a small farmer. He was one of those "common people" of whom he said, in one of those quaint outbursts which never obscured the fact that behind the utterances of the rollicking humorist there lay the mind of the statesman, the reveren- tial thinker, and the moralist, that "the Lord certainly thought most of them because he had made so many of them." Even in democratic England, whilst we read with amused contempt of the attempts made by the parvenu Napoleon to veil the obscurity of his lineage under the trappings of an assumed and tawdry Royalty, we still preserve so much of our feudal and monarchical leaven as to be somewhat startled when we hear that, but a short time before Lincoln was made President of the United States, his supporters rushed tumultuously into his room and shouted to him : "How are you, old Abe ? " At an early age, he became the proprietor of a small store. In 1858, he was described by a political opponent (Douglas) during an electoral campaign as having been "a grocery keeper dispensing drinks." Without being absolutely illiterate, he cannot be said to have been highly educated. He said of himself that, when he came of age, he could "read, write, and cipher to the rule of three, but that was all." His appearance was uncouth. His manners, though always dignified, were tinged with rusticity.

Thus, Lincoln started life weighted, if not by positive disadvantages, at least by mediocre prospects of acquiring distinction. Yet he possessed

sterling qualities which were destined to triumph over all the numerous obstacles which lay in his path. A sacred fire burnt within the man's inner soul which was sufficient to sweep aside any adventitious hin- drances arising from defective education, a humble social origin, and other similar causes. In the first place, he possessed in an eminent degree a faculty which is, indeed, only an accessory to other qualities, but which in a democratic country is an accessory of vast importance.

He was able to express his thoughts in a language which went straight not only to the intellects but to the hearts of men. Few characters,

Lord Bryce has said, "stand out so clearly revealed in their words, whether spoken or written. aw Abraham Lincoln." There was no artificiality

about his utterances. They were wholly free from the stamp of the laboured phraaemonger. So competent a judge as Lord Curzon has

expressed his opinion that the famous Gettysburg speech and Lincoln's second inaugural address are "among the glories and treasures of man- kind." These and the first inaugural address, in which a passionate and pathetic, but unfortunately fruitless, appeal was made to his countrymen to abstain from fratricidal strife, have become classics in America. They reach the high-water mark of contemporaneous oratory.

An orator, however, requires more than the faculty of clothing his thoughts in appropriate and impressive language in order to influence his audience. "Nothing," the Athenian Isocrates said, " is so persuasive as a character which is felt to be upright." It was this uprightness, coupled with a high degree of moral courage, which enabled Lincoln in 1856 to dominate a very hostile audience at Petersburg who tried to shout him down. When at last he gained a hearing, he held his audience spellbound for more than two hours, and, in his homely language, which Mr. Rankin records, "soaked that crowd full of political facts they could not get away from."

Abraham Lincoln, moreover, afforded in his own person the most striking proof recorded in modern history that, in order to lead a democracy, it is not necessary to be a demagogue in the sense in which that word is usually employed. One of those apposite proverbs which embody the concentrated essence of Eastern thought and imagination is to the effect that "Truth is the sword of God, which always cleaves when it mites." Never was the mighty weapon of veracity used with more prodigious effect than when it was wielded by the hand of Abraham Lincoln. He smote falsehood and subterfuge with all the strength of his stout heart and intrepid intellect, and left them stricken to death on the field. Speaking of a political opponent, he said : "I have not his fine education, and I cannot discourse on dialectics as he can, but I can be honest with the people and tell them what I believe." This simple and manly process secured for him a fame more enduring than that which could have been acquired by the artifices of any political trickster were he never so adroit. During his lifetime, the most humble negro paid homage to the man whom all his race worshipped under the title of "Massa Linkum." After the bullet, fired by the hand of a crazy lunatic, sped through his brain, a political associate, who during his lifetime had been but a lukewarm friend, stood by the bedside on which the corpse was laid and said : "There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen" ; and one of the "bravest of the Southern brave," Mr. Rankin tells us, on hearing the news, burst into tears and exclaimed "Oh I the unhappy South, the unhappy South I" Almost from the rust moment of his entry into political life, Lincoln fully understood what ho wanted. His whole moral being revolted against the system of slavery. But he was no ultra-abolitionist. The passion of his life was to preserve the Union. Writing to Horace Greeley, he said : "My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it ; if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it ; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that." So early as 1858, he delivered

an epoch-making speech which rang throughout the whole length and breadth of the United States. "A house divided against itself," he said, "cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free" ; and when he eventually realized, to his great regret, that the causes of the Union and the suppression of slavery were so intimately interwoven that they could not be separated, and that nothing but the power of the sword could decide tho issue, he boldly faced the consequences. In words which may be commended to the ultm-pacificists of all nations, and which might perhaps advan- tageously be borne in mind by the present occupant of the Presidential Chair, this great statesman, not in the spirit of an ambitious Bismarck

or of a Kaiser avid of glory, but in that of a peace-loving but stern moralist, who knew he had a duty to perform, said : "In a choice of evils, war may not always be the worst."

Mr. Rankin's recollections of Abraham Lincoln cannot be said to shed any very new light on his character, but they give us some inter- esting details, more especially in connexion with his domestic life. 'They tell us, for Instance, how in his youth he won the heart of the "good and charming Ann Rutledge," who was jilted by a man possessing "no more poetry or sentiment than the multiplication table," and how, on her death before they could be married, he received a blow from which he never recovered all his life. From that time forth he applied

himself earnestly to public affairs, and "he still lives in the new national spirit vibrating in unison among a hundred million citizens, now fused

into one people." Caen=