Abraham Lincoln; the Tribute of a Century, 1809-1909: Commemorative of the ...

youth dying at twenty-one, his last entreaty, the bitter exclamation, "Let me die in peace!"-finally a splendid funeral in Vienna, a tomb in the great cathedral, and a twilight song chanted by Victor Hugo to his memory. This completes the melancholy annals of the King of Rome, descendant of the Hapsburgs and Napoleon Bonaparte.

How strange but how instructive the story of this imperial eaglet when contrasted with the childhood and the career of Abraham Lincoln! No sound save the moaning of his mother greeted his coming to a rude Kentucky cabin. No poet sang his praises; no legislators prophesied his future splendor; no artist cared to limn his homely features; no famous father showed him to his comrades as the coming ruler of millions and the idol of posterity. But while the foredoomed offspring of Napoleon was watching the fountains in the gardens of his palace prison, the son of Nancy Lincoln was following his mother to her lonely grave in a wild region, among bears and untamed creatures. No private tutors shaped or spoiled his mind. No college made or marred his character. "Somehow he learned to read and cipher"-that was all, "save what he picked up in after life under," as he termed it modestly, "the pressure of necessity." For this ungainly, dark-skinned, melancholy lad felt quite early the urging of a mightier force, a force compounded of intelligence and ambition, of the ability to think and the longing to achieve.

America is opportunity indeed, but not for everybody. Many children were born in Kentucky in 1809, but only one Abraham Lincoln. Many settlers found their way to Indiana when the Territory became a State, but not many future statesmen; many clerks handled the goods and chatted with the customers in the country stores of Illinois, but very few among them rose to eminence.

Lincoln, the farm boy, the store clerk, the surveyor, became Lincoln the lawyer and Lincoln the statesman, not because of his environment and its difficulties, but because he saw and seized his opportunities. Defects he had indeed; defects of character and defects contracted from vulgar and mean surroundings; but he had great powers, together with a capacity

for self-development and self-conquest, which is the secret of all enduring greatness.

Abraham Lincoln was always nobler than his surroundings and wiser than his companions; but there has been in many places, and not seldom here in this great state to which his name and that of Grant have given imperishable lustre, a somewhat grudging recognition of his nobility and wisdom. His image has been obscured by the breath of men who thought that he was altogether such an one as themselves, and who fastened upon the defects of his massive nature as though they were the substance of his being; men who were fain to magnify their own pettiness by creeping into some crevice of his character.

You will permit me, therefore, to recall a paragraph from one of his early speeches, a paragraph that lives in my mind as the cathedral utterance of Abraham Lincoln, because I can never recall it without the vision of some mighty structure soaring upwards like the dome of St. Peter's or the spires of Cologne's beautiful temple into that ampler ether where a sublime human achievement is made glorious by the greeting of the radiant skies.

Speaking of the slave power, he exclaimed:

"Broken by it, I, too, may be; bow to it, I never will. The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause which we deem to be just. It shall not deter me. If I ever feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country deserted by all the world besides, and I, standing up boldly and alone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequence, before high heaven, and in the face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty, and my love."

Here is the key to the peculiar character of Abraham Lincoln. His soul was capable of infinite expansion; and under the inspiration of great opportunity and tremendous responsibility his soul did expand to dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect; but it was a soul whose final majesty, whose ultimate harmonious proportions were never quite

comprehended by men who boasted that they, too, were hewn from the same rough quarry and who flattered themselves that they, too, might have expanded to the same grandeur.

Yet, even these could not hide the fact that Lincoln had been always a being apart-friendly, sociable, kindly, helpful; but singularly, although not offensively, unlike his neighbors. The strength of a giant was the servant of "a heart as big as his arms were long." Like Garibaldi, the hero of United Italy, he could not bear the sight or sound of needless suffering. Bigger and stronger than any of his companions, he was the gentlest of them all. But the quality of his mind was wholly different from theirs; indeed it was of a quality exceedingly rare in the whole world. Lincoln had marvellous mental eyesight. He looked not so much at things as into them. His vision was not only accurate, but penetrating. It was a vision unblurred by his own hasty fancies or his own wishes; and a vision undimmed by prevalent misstatements or current misconceptions; a vision never long perturbed by the sophistries of men skilled to make "the worse appear the better reason.

Referring once to the declaration of Galileo that a ball dropped and a ball shot from the mouth of a cannon would strike the ground at the same instant, Lincoln said that long before he knew the reasons for it, it seemed to him that it must be so. Like Galileo, he saw the thing before and not merely after it was proved. He saw that the downward pull on both balls must be the same, and that the outward drive of the one had nothing whatever to do with the time of its fall. We may indeed wonder what might have been his career, if, like Michael Faraday, he had first read books of science instead of the Revised Statutes of Illinois or the Commentaries of Blackstone that he found in a pile of rubbish. Fate decreed, however, that this rare quality of penetrative vision should be applied to law and to statecraft-especially to the problems then challenging the thought of the American people. This vision, moreover, was not only penetrative; it was prophetic. He could foresee consequences as distinctly as he could discern realities. It was not pure guessing, when he exclaimed, "This government cannot endure permanently half