not continue. To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor as nearly as possible is a worthy object of any good government."

On his way to the Capitol for his first Inauguration, he was surprised at Cincinnati by a delegation of two thousand German workmen whose spokesman addressed him as the champion of free homesteads, and concluded:

"We firmly adhere to the principles which directed our votes in your favor. We trust that you, the self-reliant, because self-made man, will uphold the Constitution and the laws against the secret treachery and avowed treason. If to this end you should in turn be in need of men, the German free workingmen, with others, will rise as one man at your call ready to risk their lives in the effort to maintain the victory already won by freedom over slavery."

In reply Lincoln said: "I deem it my duty to wait until the last moment for the development of the present national difficulties before I express myself decidedly as to what course I shall pursue. I hope, then, not to be false to anything that you expect of me." He agreed then that workingmen are the basis of all government, and that a man's duty is "to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating the conditions of mankind." So far as government lands could be disposed of, he was, he said, “in favor of cutting up the wild land into parcels, so that every poor man may have a home."

In these two speeches he synthesized and vitalized the labor problem; not of the individual, not of the State, not of the separate States, but of the world, universally, just as he had synthesized it in a direct way in the slave question with the declaration that a man was entitled to eat the bread his labor had produced.

Compare with the broader vision of Lincoln, the labor conditions of today with some labor leaders holding that the separate labor union is a law unto itself, without taking into consideration Lincoln's admonition that a man's duty is "to improve his own condition but also to assist in ameliorating the condition of mankind."

Chapter V
MANHOOD

T THE AGE of seventeen Lincoln was the tallest as well as the strongest man, physically, in all the coun

A

try round. He was equally superior in intellect and passion. He had mastered whatever books had come to his hand, including stray books on the law. He had composed an essay on American Government calling attention to the necessity of preserving the Constitution. He had given utterance to a pronouncement on temperance which won the approbation as well as the wonder of a local preacher of renown, and which found publication in an Ohio paper. He had managed a ferry boat across the Ohio, which he afterward declared to be the "toughest work a young man could be made to do." The following year he made an excursion into the outer world by way of a flatboat loaded with provisions, down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, returning by steamboat and on foot across country, an adventure of some moment among a people to whom a visit from one settlement to another was considered a journey worth recounting. He had felt the magnificence of the Father of Waters as it bore him upon its bosom between its rugged shores and past the far-stretched plantations that bordered its swiftly broadening currents. He had had opportunity of contrasting the humble life of frontier civilization under in

dividual freedom with the busy hum of a metropolitan city where only the few were free and the many were bound to serfdom.

Of these experiences was born the desire for action independent of restraint. He longed to strike out into the broad world where he might try for himself those powers which he felt already swelling in his bosom. But his loyalty to the code that bound him to his father until his majority, held him back. In his perplexity, halting between desire and duty, he sought the advice of William Wood, a lawyer by whose permission he had nosed among the few law books of which his office boasted. His plan was to get a place on one of the boats plying up and down the river. His lawyer friend presented the moral duty that rested on him to remain with his father until he could legally strike out for himself, or until his parent had released him from his filial obligation. He returned home seriously determined not to evade the claim from which in a few months he would be finally released.

And now came to the little group of settlers of the loggedoff lands, wooing tales of a country farther west where there were sun-kissed prairies whose splendid soil offered rich returns to the husbandman. The call of the setting sun was in the blood of Father Lincoln and in the year of the son's majority the family moved from Indiana to a new home in Macon County, Illinois. All the children had now grown to man's and woman's estate. Two weddings had been celebrated in the family. Sarah Lincoln, the daughter, had been married to Aaron Grigsby, a young man living in the vicinity, and Mrs. Lincoln's daughter had left the Lincoln cabin for a new home. The new families joined in the emigration. Lincoln's sister, Sarah, died two years later in childbirth, the second great grief that came to chasten the heart of the lonely, studious son of the forest.

From the deep woods of the Indiana home to the broad, verdant prairie lands of central Illinois was a transition which served to give new form and color to young Lincoln's aspirations. Here were rolling prairies, gently wooded slopes, clear water courses flashing in the sunlight, and rich soil needing only the plow's shining blade to prepare it for the seeds and fruits of husbandry. Dennis Hanks, a relative of Lincoln's mother, had gone forward to reconnoiter and select the land, and he had chosen a pleasing prospect on which the new home was to be built. Having helped to complete the new cabin and fence in a tract of the farm, Abraham Lincoln, now twenty-one, stepped forth into the freedom he had longed for. Separation from his home people meant a great deal to him. He needed companions. From childhood he had been intermittently retiring and social. Whatever he discovered in his reading or play that carried laughter or wisdom in its substance he hastened to deliver with his own inventions to his friends. His whole life expressed his hunger for companionship. He read books and practiced recitations in a group of his boyhood friends just as afterwards he composed the Gettysburg Address, on his way to the dedication.

What close companionship meant to Lincoln is shown in every detail of his history that has been unearthed by his biographers. As a child he sought to know everybody in his neighborhood. The proprietor of the village store was his confidant, the school teacher his friend and adviser, the lawyer his model in speech and action. He learned all the ballads current in the region and recited them over and over to whomsoever would listen and wherever the slightest opportunity presented itself. From half melancholy moments of retirement, or from poring over a school book or one of the few works of the imagination which he knew, he would hurry