and whom he should lead to the green pastures of the Promised Land. It is not because the same or like qualities of character do not still inhere in human nature, that America -nay, the world-will never again see the like of Lincoln, but because the circumstances of his early and later life can never be reproduced. America, alas! had already grown old -old with power, with wealth, with the exhausting ravage and absorption of her territory, and with the infusions of what we used to call the Old World. The frame-setting of Abraham Lincoln's youth is as absolutely gone as the great American desert, now a garden, or the buffalo and his Indian chaser, now ghosts of a dream. Nor is it true that Lincoln had no education in his boyhood. He, indeed, went little to school, yet he learned to read, write, and cipher; and what more does any school-boy learn to-day? "Reading," says Bacon, summing up education, "maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man." All these had the youth, Abraham Lincoln. With them he stood at the gate of all treasures, key in hand, as much master of the future as a graduate of Yale or Harvard. He knew the Bible thoroughly, Esop's "Fables," "Pilgrim's Progress," "Robinson Crusoe," the "Lives" of Washington and Henry Clay; Burns, and later, Shakespeare. He not only read them with the eye, but made them a part of his mind. The list is small, but it is a range of history and poetry. Washington and Clay may well have been the spur of Lincoln's ambitious Americanism; the Bible and Burns, of his inspiration and sentiment and unexcelled style; Esop's Fables" and "Pilgrim's Progress," of his aptness of illustration. The incidents of his early life are few, but suggestive. At nineteen he made a trip down the Mississippi River on a flatboat to New Orleans, and there sold a cargo-a trip of larger education than Thomas Jefferson had ever taken at the same age. A year later his father, who for four years had been living in Indiana, went to Illinois; and the boy, driving the ox-team which bore all the household goods, helping build the home of logs, and split the rails of the farm UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ANN ARBOR, Oct 25 190 The lapse of time increases rather than diminishes the fance of is so remote from us that it does not in the oldest numarchies is Even مل givemments governing. do peoples more and more cuple his dance with that of Wasknegten and look to him and his great pridecenser at the susamplex of the republican leaders. The memory of Lincolis character and a foricelus Endowment to us but to the world. ни 18 a Facsimile of Manuscript Tribute from James B. Angell, President Emeritus of the University of Michigan fence those rails so famous afterwards-was thus a resident of three States of the Union before his majority, three States representing the very growth of his magnificent country. Coming of age, he made a second flatboat descent to New Orleans. It was there he saw for the first time the chaining, whipping, and sale of negroes, and it may be that the impression then made, inspired those immortal words in his Second Inaugural: "Fondly do we hope-fervently do we pray-that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" Returning to Illinois, he was clerk in a village store, which meant again opportunities-by no means suffering-under comparison with those of a college graduate of to-day in a lawyer's or broker's office in the city. It meant constant discussion of political, religious, and social questions. It meant a struggle for mastery in physical exercise and grocerystore debate. At twenty-three, in the Black Hawk War, Lincoln was Captain of a military company-another step in large American life. Then he "kept store," where his honesty won him the name of "Honest Abe." At twentyfour he was Postmaster of the village-in other words, the centre and conduit of its intelligence. All this time he was absorbing every book he could get, learning law and mathematics, and, when his store became a failure, supported himself by surveying. He had already engaged in political life, often addressed his fellow-citizens with telling effect, was defeated as a candidate for the Illinois House of Representatives when twenty-three, and elected at twenty-five. Review this first chapter, and tell me where can be found a better preparation for an American career. To what one of those whom we call the favored youths of the land have not his splendid advantages of social position and university education sometimes seemed an obstacle rather than a help in the path that leads through the popular hedge to the popular service? Hard lines! Lincoln's is rather one of the illustriously fortunate careers of young men. The accidents of hard manual toil, scanty living, no money, splitting of rails, are only the paint and pasteboard of the scene, the tricks with which rhetoric loves to embellish the contrasts of a eulogy. "A man 's a man for a' that." Lincoln was reëlected three times to the Legislature, serving with Douglas and others who, like himself, became afterwards famous. He identified himself with anti-slavery measures, protesting with only one other associate, at a time when even a protest was almost political martyrdom, against the extremities of pro-slavery. Meantime he went into the practice of the law, where again his opportunity was large. Each County had its Court House, and this, rude as it might be, was always, in the absence of other attractions-and there were few other attractions-the centre of popular interest and attendance, the arena for advocacy and trial. From one to another the lawyers rode a circuit. Among them were some of the brightest men of the time, afterwards potent in national councils, among whom Lincoln's genius of homely power soon bore him to the front, a favorite alike with clients and the bar. With this came still further prominence in all public range. He delivered lectures on politics, temperance, literature, and inventions. He was a favorite on the stump. An ardent Henry Clay Whig, he was often pitted against Douglas and other Democratic leaders. He was a moving spirit in the Harrison campaign of 1840 and the Clay and Polk campaign in 1844, being on the Illinois Whig electoral ticket each time, the second time at its head. In 1848, as afterwards just before the War, he spoke in New England. When, therefore, either as a matter of reproach or apotheosis, his candidacy for the presidency in 1860 is referred to as that of an unknown Illinois rail-splitter, it is well enough to remember that some twenty years before that time he was the foremost popular champion of anti-slavery principles in the North-west. In 1847 he entered the Thirtieth Congress of the United |