but we love him because he is the great Master of men—the Perfect Ruler of men-who in his humble birth and in his magic power to charm the hearts of men, has made all the dearer to us the story of Bethlehem's wayside inn two thousand years ago. As those three swarthy lords from the Orient hills paid their loving homage to the Child in the manger that first Christmas morning, so there were "wise men" at Washington in 1860 who laid their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh at the feet of Abraham Lincoln, the child of the West. I suppose the most powerful body of men ever associated in American history, was President Lincoln's Cabinet in the first year of his administration. There was William H. Seward, the ablest diplomatist of his age; Edward Bates of Missouri, that wily political chief of the old Whig school; Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, courtly, able, dignified, polished. These three men had been Lincoln's active opponents at Chicago for the nomination in 1860, and with the instinct of a perfect ruler he gathered them in his Cabinet, that no dissensions might arise among them to imperil the country. Then there were those great lawyers of Indiana, Caleb B. Smith, and John P. Upsher; Montgomery Blair, the leader of the Maryland Bar; Gideon Welles of Connecticut; Edwin M. Stanton-a fiery eight-in-hand they were, some of them having never worked in harness before-that is having never held office before-with Abraham Lincoln on the box. They pulled up evenly on the bit at the start; but from the slack rein over their backs, each soon, to change the figure, imagined that around himself and his department, was whirling the grotesque Abraham Lincoln like an attending satellite. Secretary Seward was the first to have his mind disabused of this impression, as one day he received a touch with the whip on the flank. And he looked around and wondered if the man on the box meant it. He certainly did. It happened in this way. One day Mr. Seward said to Lincoln, "Now, you have this great war on your hands, you attend to home matters, and I will look after our foreign relations." And I can imagine Abraham Lincoln laughing one of those loud western prairie laughs of his, such as John Hay tells us of, as he said, "What a capital idea, Seward; what a team we 'll make! But say!"-as Mr. Seward was about leaving him, perhaps thinking in his heart what easy game he had made of Abraham Lincoln-"Don't forget to show me everything you receive, and particularly everything you send away." And that was all. Members of the Grand Army of the Republic, you will remember when you enlisted in 1861 and went down to bloody battlefields that the Republic might live, our relations were very much strained with England. The whole North was greatly shocked when a Cunard steamer arrived in New York one morning in the first week of May, 1861, with the published proclamation of Queen Victoria's recognition of the belligerency of the Confederate States. It was a severe blow to Lincoln and Seward, and it was then necessary for Mr. Seward to make good his suggestions and write his first important state paper, viz., a letter of instructions to Charles Francis Adams, our Minister at the Court of St. James. It was such a delicate task that he did not submit it in dictation to a clerk, but wrote it all out carefully with his own hand in thirteen closely written pages. Remembering Lincoln's little caution, he went to the White House with it, to have Lincoln put his official "O. K." upon it. Now the condition of that letter as Lincoln returned it always reminds me of what I used to hear the good people of Cambridge say of Rufus Choate's signature "a gridiron struck by lightning." Section after section of Mr. Seward's letter had been stricken out; many words even whole sentences were erased, and new ones substituted; in some places the white spaces between the lines were entirely absorbed with the interlineation of new sentences; beautiful flowers of rhetoric were ruthlessly torn up by the roots. And then, what do you think! This humble backwoodsman who had been cradled in a hollowed-out log-whose only schooling had been the winter evenings before the rude fireplace, where, in the absence of any candles or of old rags soaked in oil, his mother had taught him and his father to read and write in the blaze of the spice-wood brush he had chopped up and thrown upon the fire, and where, stretched out upon the rough, gritty, dirt floor, he would cipher upon an old wooden shovel with a bit of charred wood picked from the fireplace, and say to himself "I'll study and get ready, and then maybe the chance will come"-what do you think of this humble backwoodsman criticising the English of the accomplished, the versatile, the scholarly William H. Seward and actually showing him that in some places he had not even expressed his own meaning! William H. Seward had a very little body but a very big brain and a very big heart of love for his country, but it would seem as if the feathers were standing out at right angles all over his little body, when he wrote this sentence of a letter to Mr. Adams: "We intend to have a clear and simple record of every issue which may arise between us and Great Britain." Lincoln bracketed the paragraph and wrote in the margin, "Leave out." Mr. Seward wrote, "The President is surprised and grieved"; Lincoln changed it to "The President regrets." Mr. Seward referred to certain acts of Great Britain as "wrongful"; Lincoln changed it to "hurtful." Mr. Seward made reference to certain explanations made by the British government; Lincoln wrote, "Leave out, because it does not appear that such explanations were demanded"—just a jog to Mr. Seward's memory. Mr. Seward wrote learnedly of "the laws of nature"; Lincoln ran his pen through the expression "laws of nature," and wrote "our own laws"-good, honest United States laws were all Abraham Lincoln was looking for in those days. Mr. Seward wrote, "The laws of nations afford us an adequate and proper remedy, and we shall avail ourselves of it"-an implied threat, you see; Lincoln wrote opposite the last part of the sentence in the margin "Out." Mr. Seward elaborated a thought in seven particular words, and Lincoln ran his pen through one, two, three, four, five, six of those words and left only one word as having sufficient carrying power to designate Mr. Seward's meaning. Mr. Seward wrote "Europe atoned |