Over here on the frontier the settlers were too busy with the other kind of trees to pay much attention to family trees. Even when Lincoln went to Congress he wrote to a man named Lincoln, living in Virginia, trying to find out something more about his own grandfather.

George Washington had his clothes made in England up to the time of the Revolutionary War. Were Abraham Lincoln's clothes made in England? It makes you smile to think of it. As a young boy the wool for his clothes was grown in Kentucky and spun there, and was there dyed with the juice of the butternut tree.

The result was that Abraham Lincoln reflected the American environment, and George Washington reflected the Old World environment. They were nearly one hundred years apart. George Washington was President eight years and had one task, and that was a foreign problem-how to keep from going to war with England on the one side, or with France on the other. He set the pattern for neutrality for America, which, thank God, we have not departed from in all the years that have followed. He set the pattern that we should be free at Washington from entangling alliances with other nations. Abraham Lincoln was President a little over four years, and what was his task? To save the American Union; a task peculiarly American. And his American environment, in the Providence of God, had fitted him to meet that problem.

Lincoln was the most original American who ever reached the presidency, and was also the most misunderstood. have never had a man in all American history who, in his life, was as much vituperated and blamed, and, in his death, as praised and deified as was Abraham Lincoln.

I wish I could show to you a collection of cartoons I possess showing how Lincoln was caricatured, how he was vilified during the Civil War; misunderstood always, both before and after he was elected President. Lincoln suffered such disadvantage as few men have suffered when coming into that high office. He lacked nearly half a million votes of having a majority for President-nearly half a million popular votes. Then how could he be elected? Only by means of our elect

oral system, voting by States. If the choice had demanded a majority of the popular vote, Lincoln would not have been elected. Furthermore, he never could have been elected if there had not been a split in the Democratic party. And still further, he never could have got the nomination away from William H. Seward, of New York, if the convention had not been held in Chicago.

The corner of Lake and Market Streets was occupied in 1860 by a great wooden structure which they called the "Wigwam." Horace Greeley came on from New York to report the convention, and he wrote back to his paper, "The Republicans have built a great structure which they call the Wigwam. God help the Indians if they ever lived in as ugly a building as this!" The second day he wrote, "The Seward people have made a mistake in allowing the convention to come to Chicago, because they are all Lincoln men out here." Greeley also wrote in his correspondence to the Tribune, "Yesterday the Seward men began the shouting, but to-day the Lincoln men had the best of it." Thereby hangs a tale as told by David Davis, one of the Lincoln managers. Seward had chartered a whole railroad train and sent it on to Chicago full of New York supporters to shout for Seward in the convention. They were headed by Tom Hyers, a celebrated prize fighter, and the first day they filled the galleries of the "Wigwam," and the Lincoln men could not get in. That night the Lincoln men went out to Evanston and secured a man who said he was the mate, or the captain, of a vessel. Whatever he was, all agreed that he had a voice that could drown any fog horn on the Great Lakes. They brought that man in that night, and when the Seward men went out to serenade the Seward headquarters at two o'clock in the morning, the Lincoln men stuffed the galleries full of their own followers, under the leadership of this captain. When the Seward men came back the following morning, they could not get into the building. The result was, as Greeley said, "The Lincoln men to-day have the best of the shouting." In the balloting they gradually won State after State, until finally a man sitting on the roof, and drawing up by a string

the results of each ballot as it was cast, shouted the news down to the crowds in the street that Seward had been defeated and that Lincoln was the nominee. The friends of Seward ratified the nomination with tears of anguish rolling down their countenances. "Why," they said, "we don't doubt that old Abe Lincoln is an honest man, but look at him! Why, nobody ever saw such a homely man! What will his picture look like in the campaign? Furthermore, with such a wellknown man as Seward we could have swept the country."

I say that Lincoln was misunderstood always, both before and after his election. You will remember that Horace Greeley supported Lincoln in the Tribune, and that it was the great Republican paper. Greeley sent a reporter to accompany Lincoln from Springfield to Washington, where he was to be inaugurated. On the road down there an incident occurred, of which the reporter sent in a description to the Tribune, and the despatch appeared with the undignified headline: "Old Abe Kissed by a Pretty Girl." Yet it was a beautiful and touching incident.

From a little village in New York State during the campaign, a little girl wrote a letter to Mr. Lincoln. She was only thirteen years old. The letter ran,

"MY DEAR MR. LINCOLN: I think if you had whiskers on your face you would look more like my papa; you would be a better looking man."

I suppose her father had one of the Lincoln lithographs hanging in the house. Now, it is purely a coincidence, but every picture of Abraham Lincoln showing him with a smooth face was made before 1860; and every picture showing him after he was elected President shows that he had grown a beard during that Summer-perhaps to cover up his face to some extent that is what he said, at least. When he started for Washington to be inaugurated, he passed through the town where his young critic lived. The train halted for a few moments. In the midst of the excitement he was standing out on the rear platform of the train, and this man from Illinois, this apparently crude, rough-exteriored man from