19 NOVEMBER 1864, Page 5

MR. LINCOLN.

ti shall as soon as these lines are in our readers' hands we shall all know the result of the election in the United States ; nor do either Mr. Lincoln's friends or his enemies entertain much doubt that its result will be the re-election of the President for a second term of office,—the first time that that event will have occurred (if it should be so) since the day of the able but unscrupulous Jackson. Indeed whatever may be the result, it is certain that no party so strong for the re-election of a President has ever existed since Jackson's second return to office as exists in the United States for Mr. Lincoln. Considering that the man was, as Sir George Cornewall Lewis contemptuously called him, a mere village attorney, a self-educated peasant, who had indeed represented Illinois in Congress, and opposed with success the celebrated Democrat Douglas, but was otherwise utterly unknown to the public, the existence of this strong feeling in his favour is sufficiently remarkable. It may be taken, and perhaps justly, as a proof that the North either has no great statesmen, or has no machinery for detecting them. But even granting this, it is clear that Mr. Lincoln has inspired more confidence in the people than men eminent there, whether on good or bad grounds, the men of his own Cabinet, Mr. Seward, Mr. Chase, Mr. Stanton. What are the qualities which have enabled a man with so few natural advantages to inspire even this qualified respect in a people carrying through—we will not say the greatest revolution, but certainly the revolution greatest in magnitude, and probably in results, that the world has even seen ?

Perhaps, in the absence of that statesmanlike presence of mind and fertility of resource for which no one would give Mr. Lincoln any considerable credit, the greatest quality he has shown, and that by which he has most distinguished him- self from his more eminent colleagues, is a certain naturalism of mind,—closely connected perhaps, but not identical with, his high integrity,—which has enabled him to look at the position of the Government and the movements of the popular feeling as if he stood outside both, and were studying their situation and the influences which affect them almost as a student of natural history would study the instincts of an animal, and judge of its chances in a deadly struggle with another of different nature. Compare his few and well-marked speeches and acts with the false and feverish anticipations of Mr. Seward, or the ener- getic proselytism of any of the parties which strove to push him on or pull him back. He has not exactly guided the people or the Government, but he has discovered accurately the time when the people were ripe for a fresh stride for- wards, has declared the hour come, and never receded with that deceptive backward movement of the wave which is really only the preparation for another advance. Mr. Lincoln has never gone out of his way to anticipate or hope. He has simply announced from time to time the maturity of a new stage of opinion, — the conditions under which alone the war could be successfully prosecuted, — but without misleading the public by dangling out political baits. He has kept silent when other politicians adminis- tered injurious stimulants to public opinion. In moments of triumph he has not been elated, and in moments of disaster he has not given any symptom of depression. He has never swerved for a moment, even under the excitement of the first great responsibility, from the principles he had accepted before his election, and has been apparently the most unim- passioned of critics as to the new steps necessary to prevent the surrender of any of those principles. And we believe this strict naturalism in the treatment of the popular forces has suited far better the mass of Northern Americans than one of Mr. Carlyle's born "Kings or Canning men" who might have tried to mould too fast the slow fibre of American consti- tutionalism Then even as an administrator Mr. Lincoln has shown not indeed quick and keen discernment, but a steady experi- mental judgment. He promoted General M'Clellan only be- cause General M'Clellan had really shown judgment and capacity on a small scale in Northern Virginia, and he gave General M'Clellan more than a patient trial. He removed him not before it was certain that he had not the promptitude or audacity to do what was expected of him. He made no doubt a series of even less successful experiments on General M'Clellan's successors—Pope, Burnside, Hooker. But he tried to repair each blunder as soon as it became evident, and at length got a general of real merit in General Meade. No sooner did General Grant's campaigns in the West make his abilities conspicuous than he received the highest command, and was left so completely unfettered in his plans, allowed so unhesitatingly to choose his own subordinates, that he has him- self volunteered to accept all the blame of non-success. This was clearly the course of a sensible administrator, and it has answered well. Every one of General Grant's own appoint- ments, especially Sherman and Sheridan, have shown precisely those military qualities which Mr. Lincoln had not himself the discernment to detect. He made a number of fruitless experiments, but by his first successful experiment he gathered all the profit a shrewd and cautious man could glean from it. And the result is that from nearly two-thirds of its ori- ginal area the rebellion has been expelled, including the mountain fastnesses of Tennessee and Georgia, while only one port remains open to the Confederate commerce. Except his cool external way of watching the development of events, and his thoroughly honest experimentalism as an administrator, probably Mr. Lincoln's thorough conservatism of feeling is his greatest recommendation in the eyes of the country party of the North. He is in some respects to the people of the North what George III. was during the first American rebellion to the people of England,—a man really identified with them in their prejudices as well ar in their small virtues, and a clinging man who expresses the force with which the Anglo-Saxon cleaves alike to prejudices and virtues. Of course Mr. Lincoln is the George III. of a more instructed people, and therefore a great improvement on that worthy, and of course, too, he has the incalculable advantage of fighting against a rebellion identified not with freedom, but with slavery. Mr. Lincoln has a mind as much open to new conviction as an average Yankee farmer, which is saying a good deal. George III, had a mind as much closed against new conviction as an average English farmer of that day, and that, too, was saying a good deal. But both at bottom were shrewd men, with a good deal of slow tenacity of purpose ;—George III., in:compensation for being much the more prejudiced and obstinate man, being also perhaps the sharper in manipulating the motives (selfish or generous) of his advisers, of the two. At all events we hold it certain that Mr. Lincoln's thorough conservatism and legality of mind have been some of his greatest advantages. The North feels in every fibre that it is resisting a revolution, and that so far as it is re- volutionary it is only revolutionary to crush revolution. No man has given such distinct expression to this feeling as Mr. Lincoln. He is more revolutionary than General M'Clellan only because he is less so. General M'Clellan would cling to slavery, and let the Union go. Mr. Lincoln would abolish slavery to preserve the Union. The former is a conservative who prefers an institution to the Constitution,—the latter a conservative who prefers the Constitution to an institution, and even dislikes that institution because it has undermined the Constitution. The latter conservatism the North thinks the true political conservatism,—the former only social con- servatism, which it does not value, and has begun even to dread.

These are the qualities which, combined with the greatest qualities of all,—an integrity and candour above suspicion in a time of prevalent political corruption, and still more preva- lentpolitical disingenuousness,—have gained for a mere peasant the popularity which an accomplished diplomatist like Mr. Buchanan not only could not keep but turned into scorn, and which an accomplished soldier like General M'Clellan has, we trust and believe, utterly failed to win.