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government, such as universal suffrage, temperance, and slavery, he said that "all such questions must first find lodgment with the most enlightened souls who stamp them with their approval. In God's own time they will be organized into law and thus woven into the fabric of our institutions."

There is proof enough of Lincoln's sympathy with suffering, and his quick response to the call of distress. He detested liquor while sorrowing for the drunkard, and his settled hatred for the institution of slavery was inborn. It was not the injustice of slavery in its constitutional operation that stirred him to protest, but the attempt to override the Constitution by the extension of slavery into the Territories against the edicts of the Constitution. And much as he must have suffered in sympathy with Lovejoy and deplored his murder, it was not the crime of murder of a man, so much as the crime against the body of the State, against the fundamental principle of free speech, that brought him into the forum with eloquent protest and prophetic exclamation. He was a patriot first, holding the body of the State inviolate, and a humanitarian afterwards. And as at this time he looked at the gashes in the robe of Columbia, following the wild strokes of the mob, before he turned to soothe the wounds of the individuals or proclaim their right, so when the Nation was rent by an insurrectionary war, he saw the danger which threatened the Union before all else, and gave his tears, his sympathy, and his great powers to succor the unfortunate and the unhappy only when he had used up every power and every expedient in binding up the Nation's wounds and preparing for its future security.

Mob law shocked him out of Provincialism into Nationalism. He saw the coming danger to the State. The theme of the Great Tragedy which had its initial utterance with the

murder of Lovejoy at Alton found its echo in his soul, which would never cease to sound until it should culminate in his own martyrdom in Washington.

Chapter VIII

LAWYER AND LEGISLATOR

̄N MARCH, 1837, Lincoln was licensed to practice law.
His preparation had been in harmony with all his other

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activities, looking toward superiority in any accomplishment. He never studied in a law office, he tells us with becoming modesty. His library had always been his armpit, his study the spot that brought him a moment's leisure. And he had no sooner acquired a bit of knowledge then he put it to the test of expression. Sometimes it was a single boon companion who heard his first phrasing of an idea he had absorbed, sometimes it was a group of the rough Clary Grove boys, sometimes it was merely a group of trees or a less responsive audience of stumps in a logged-off patch of the forest.

In New Salem he had embraced every opportunity to appear before the Justice of the Peace to argue the case for some walletless litigant whose rights had been threatened in a minor matter, and it was in this free and untrammeled practice of the art of pleading that he discovered the power of fable applied to morals, and which equipped him with that inexhaustible fund of anecdote with which he was ever fond of illustrating a point of law or revealing a principle. His theory was sound. Later in life he wrote to a student who wished instructions as to how to become a lawyer, emphasizing those virtues that needs must accompany success. His

conclusions are purely Lincolnian and reveal the man as the soul of honesty and truth. "There is a vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest," he writes. "I say vague, because when we consider to what extent confidence and honors are reposed in and conferred upon lawyers by the people, it appears improbable that their impression of dishonesty is very distinct or vivid. Yet the impression is common, almost universal. Let no young man choosing the law for a calling for a moment yield to the popular belief. Resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation, rather than one in the choosing of which you do, in advance, consent to be a knave."

Lincoln formed a partnership with John T. Stuart, a comrade in the Blackhawk War, who had gained rather an extensive practice and was at the time just recovering from the effects of a Congressional race in which he had been the loser. He entered upon the practice of law in a community of pioneers hot with the passion of political strife and fearless in its expression of opinion. When arguments failed, fists were used with brutal frequency. During the heated campaign of 1838, Douglas and Stuart, candidates for Congress, Herndon tells us, fought like tigers in his father's grocery over a floor that was drenched with slops, and gave up the struggle only when both were exhausted. Then as a fitting curtain to the episode, Mr. Stuart ordered a “barrel of whiskey and wine."

In the rear end of Speed's store over which Lincoln slept, aspiring candidates for public favor gathered nightly about a big open fireplace and debated with vigor questions of the hour. Campaigns were made personal affairs. Candidates

visiting scattered homes of the settlement presented their qualifications for office and the principles of the party they represented to the household, not neglecting to make show of interest in mother and children. Wherever a crowd could be got together politicians appeared to challenge their opponents with vigor, if not with courtesy and logic.

Small wonder that Lincoln, whose love for public speaking had been fostered by practice upon every possible occasion since childhood, should have jumped immediately into this stream of debate and stirred up the waters in no mean way. If the Lincoln legends of those days glow with too much. animal fire to please the ears of present day civilization, it should be remembered that he had been trained in a rough school, that his nature was fundamentally human, and that his sympathy for men rather than respect for refinements built up on social conventions, prompted the ready use of that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. He had an inexhaustible fund of humor and he used it with a free hand where it would count more in carrying his point than all the fine-spun philosophy or glittering show of sandpapered rhetoric.

Lincoln had an overweening affection for life in all its phases and did not believe anything to be gained by viewing it only on dress parade. Once when Carpenter was executing his well-known picture of the Cabinet, the subject of Shakespeare chanced to come under discussion, and Lincoln remarked that he could see no good reason for the expurgation of certain passages in the plays when they were presented, feeling that to take away any portion of the expressed life of the time in which they were written was to give a onesided view of it and to make doubtful of being understood other characters and arguments of the play. But all his con

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