with a touch of humor, you know that his misfortunes are not going to subdue or kill him. You should try to instill into every distressed friend the inclination to hold himself off at arm's length, and should assure him that, after all, there have been worse cases on record. Mr. Lincoln was not under the impression that his own misfortunes were unique, and he was not under the impression that the misfortunes of his fellow-men were unique or unalterable. Therefore he was detached; therefore he was a wit; therefore he told you a story to show that he was not so intense upon a matter that he could not recognize the funny side of it.

Not only that, but Lincoln was a singularly studious man -not studious in the ordinary conventional sense. To be studious in the ordinary, conventional sense, if I may judge by my observation at a university, is to do the things you have to do and not understand them particularly. But to be studious, in the sense in which Mr. Lincoln was studious, is to follow eagerly and fearlessly the curiosity of a mind which will not be satisfied unless it understands. That is a deep studiousness; that is the thing which lays bare the map of life and enables men to understand the circumstances in which they live, as nothing else can do.

And what commends Mr. Lincoln's studiousness to me is that the result of it was he did not have any theories at all. Life is a very complex thing. No theory that I ever heard propounded will match its varied pattern; and the men who are dangerous are the men who are not content with understanding, but go on to propound theories, things which will make a new pattern for society and a new model for the universe. Those are the men who are not to be trusted. Because, although you steer by the North Star, when you have lost the bearings of your compass, you nevertheless must steer in a pathway on the sea,-you are not bound for the North Star. The man who insists upon his theory insists that there is a way to the North Star, and I know, and every one knows, that there is not-at least none yet discovered. Lincoln was one of those delightful students who do not seek to tie you up in the meshes of any theory.

Such was Mr. Lincoln,-not a singular man; a very normal man, but normal in gigantic proportions, the whole character of him is on as great a scale-and yet so delightfully informal in the way it was put together-as was the great frame in which he lived. That great, loose-jointed, angular frame that Mr. Lincoln inhabited was a very fine symbol of the big, loose-jointed, genial, angular nature that was inside; angular, not in the sense of having sharp corners upon which men might wound themselves, but angular as nature is angular. Nature is not symmetrical like the Renaissance architecture. Nature is an architect who does not, in the least, mind putting a very different thing on one side from what it has put on the other. Your average architect wants to balance his windows; to have consistency and balance in the parts. But nature is not interested in that. Nature does what it pleases, and so did the nature of Lincoln. It did what it pleased, and was no more conventionalized and symmetrical than the body of the man himself.

Mr. Lincoln belonged to a type which is fast disappearing, the type of the frontiersman. And he belonged to a process which has almost disappeared from this country. Mr. Lincoln seemed slow in his development, but when you think of the really short span of his life and the distance he traversed in the process of maturing, you will see that it can not be said to have been a slow process. Mr. Lincoln was bred in that part of the country-this part, though we can hardly conceive it now-where States were made as fast as men. Lincoln was made along with the States that were growing as fast as men were. States were born and came to their maturity, in that day, within the legal limit of twenty-one years, and the very pressure of that rapid change, the very imperious necessity of that quick process of maturing, was what made and moulded men with a speed and in a sort which have never since been matched. Here were the processes of civilization and of the building up of polities crowded into a single generation; and where such processes are crowded, men grow. Men could be picked out in the crude, and, if put in that crucible, could be refined out in a single genera

tion into pure metal. That was the process which made Mr. Lincoln. We could not do it that way again, because that period has passed forever with us.

Mr. Lincoln could not have been born at any other time and he could not have been made in any other way. I took the liberty of saying in New York the other day that it was inconceivable that Mr. Lincoln could have been born in New York. I did not intend thereby any disparagement of New York, but simply to point the moral that he could not have been born in a finished community. He had to be produced in a community that was on the make, in the making. New York is on the make, but it is not in the making.

Mr. Lincoln, in other words, was produced by processes which no longer exist anywhere in America, and therefore we are solemnized by this question: Can we have other Lincolns? We cannot do without them. This country is going to have crisis after crisis. God send they may not be bloody crises, but they will be intense and acute. No body politic so abounding in life and so puzzled by problems as ours is can avoid moving from crisis to crisis. We must have the leadership of sane, genial men of universal use like Lincoln, to save us from mistakes and give us the necessary leadership in such days of struggle and of difficulty. And yet, such men will hereafter have to be produced among us by processes which are not characteristically American, but which belong to the whole world.

There was something essentially native, American, about Lincoln; and there will, no doubt, be something American about every man produced by the processes of America; but no such distinguished process as the process, unique and separate, of that early age can be repeated for us.

It seems to me serviceable, therefore, to ask ourselves what it is that we must reproduce in order not to lose the breed, the splendid breed, of men of this calibre. Mr. Lincoln we describe as "a man of the people," and he was a man of the people, essentially. But what do we mean by a "man of the people"? We mean a man, of course, who has his rootage deep in the experiences and the consciousness of the

ordinary mass of his fellow-men; but we do not mean a man whose rootage is holding him at their level. We mean a man who, drawing his sap from such sources, has, nevertheless, risen above the level of the rest of mankind and has got an outlook over their heads, seeing horizons which they are too submerged to see; a man who finds and draws his inspiration from the common plane, but nevertheless has lifted himself to a new place of outlook and of insight; who has come out from the people and is their leader, not because he speaks from their ranks, but because he speaks for them and for their interests.

Browning has said:

"A nation is but the attempt of many
To rise to the completer life of one;
And they who live as models for the mass
Are singly of more value than they all."

Lincoln was of the mass, but he was so lifted and big that all men could look upon him, until he became the "model for the mass" and was "singly of more value than they all."

It was in that sense that Lincoln was "a man of the people." His sources were where all the pure springs are, but his streams flowed down into other country and fertilized other plains, where men had become sophisticated with the life of an older age.

A great nation is not led by a man who simply repeats the talk of the street-corners or the opinions of the newspapers. A nation is led by a man who hears more than those things; or who, rather, hearing those things, understands them better, unites them, puts them into a common meaning; speaks, not the rumors of the street, but a new principle for a new age; a man in whose ears the voices of the nation do not sound like the accidental and discordant notes that come from the voice of a mob, but concurrent and concordant like the united voices of a chorus, whose many meanings, spoken by melodious tongues, unite in his understanding in a single meaning and reveal to him a

single vision, so that he can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice. Such is the man who leads a great, free, democratic nation.

We must always be led by "men of the people," and therefore it behooves us to know them when we see them. How shall we distinguish them? Judged by this man, interpreted by this life, what is a "man of the people"? How shall we know him when he emerges to our view?

Well, in the first place, it seems to me that a man of the people is a man who sees affairs as the people see them, and not as a man of particular classes or the professions sees them. You cannot afford to take the advice of a man who has been too long submerged in a particular profession,-not because you cannot trust him to be honest and candid, but because he has been too long immersed and submerged, and through the inevitable pressure and circumstances of his life has come to look upon the nation from a particular point of view. The man of the people is a man who looks far and wide upon the nation, and is not limited by a professional point of view. That may be a hard doctrine; it may exclude some gentlemen ambitious to lead; but I am not trying to exclude them by any arbitrary dictum of my own; I am trying to interpret so much as I understand of human history, and if human history has excluded them, you cannot blame me. Human history has excluded them, as far as I understand it, and that is the end of the matter. I am not excluding them. In communities like ours, governed by general opinion and not led by classes, not dictated to by special interests, they are of necessity excluded. You will see that it follows that a man of the people is not subdued by any stuff of life that he has happened to work in; that he is free to move in any direction his spirit prompts. Are you not glad that Mr. Lincoln did not succeed too deeply in any particular calling; that he was sufficiently detached to be lifted to a place of leadership and to be used by the whole country? Are you not glad that he had not narrowed his view and understanding to any particular interest,-did not think in the terms of interest but in the terms of life? Are you not