19, and all the churches throughout the country were invited to join at the same time in appropriate observances. The ceremonies in the East Room were brief and simple-the burial service, a prayer, and a short address; while all the pomp and circumstance which the government could command was employed to give a fitting escort from the White House to the Capitol, where the body of the President was to lie in state. The vast procession moved amid the booming of minute-guns, and the tolling of all the bells in Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria; and to associate the pomp of the day with the greatest work of Lincoln's life, a detachment of colored troops marched at the head of the line.

As soon as it was announced that Mr. Lincoln was to be buried at Springfield, Illinois, every town and city on the route begged that the train might halt within its limits and give its people the opportunity of testifying their grief and reverence. It was finally arranged that the funeral cortège should follow substantially the same route over which he had come in 1861 to take possession of the office to which he had given a new dignity and value for all time. On April 21, accompanied by a guard of honor, and in a train decked with somber trappings, the journey was begun. At Baltimore, through which, four years before, it was a question whether the President-elect could pass with safety to his life, the coffin was taken with reverent care to the great dome of the Exchange, where, surrounded with evergreens and lilies, it lay for several hours, the people passing by in mournful throngs. The same demonstration was repeated, gaining continually in intensity of feeling and solemn splendor of display, in every city through which the procession passed. The reception in New York was worthy alike

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of the great city and of the memory of the man they honored. The body lay in state in the City Hall, and a half-million people passed in deep silence before it. Here General Scott came, pale and feeble, but resolute, to pay his tribute of respect to his departed friend and commander.

The train went up the Hudson River by night, and at every town and village on the way vast waiting crowds were revealed by the fitful glare of torches, and dirges and hymns were sung. As the train passed into Ohio, the crowds increased in density, and the public grief seemed intensified at every step westward. The people of the great central basin were claiming their own. The day spent at Cleveland was unexampled in the depth of emotion it brought to life. Some of the guard of honor have said that it was at this point they began to appreciate the place which Lincoln was to hold in history.

The last stage of this extraordinary progress was completed, and Springfield reached at nine o'clock on the morning of May 3. Nothing had been done or thought of for two weeks in Springfield but the preparations for this day, and they had been made with a thoroughness which surprised the visitors from the East. The body lay in state in the Capitol, which was richly draped from roof to basement in black velvet and silver fringe. Within it was a bower of bloom and fragrance. For twenty-four hours an unbroken stream of people passed through, bidding their friend and neighbor welcome home and farewell; and at ten o'clock on May 4, the coffin lid was closed, and a vast procession moved out to Oak Ridge, where the town. had set apart a lovely spot for his grave, and where the dead President was committed to the soil of the State which had so loved and honored him. The cere

monies at the grave were simple and touching. Bishop Simpson delivered a pathetic oration; prayers were offered and hymns were sung; but the weightiest and most eloquent words uttered anywhere that day were those of the second inaugural, which the committee had wisely ordained to be read over his grave, as the friends of Raphael chose the incomparable canvas of the Transfiguration to be the chief ornament of his funeral.

XXXVIII

Lincoln's Early Environment-Its Effect on his Character-His Attitude toward Slavery and the Slaveholder -His Schooling in Disappointment-His Seeming Failures-His Real Successes-The Final Trial-His Achievements-His Place in History

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CHILD born to an inheritance of want; a boy growing into a narrow world of ignorance; a youth taking up the burden of coarse manual labor; a man entering on the doubtful struggle of a local backwoods career--these were the beginnings of Abraham Lincoln, if we analyze them under the hard practical cynical philosophy which takes for its motto that "nothing succeeds but success." If, however, we adopt a broader philosophy, and apply the more generous and more universal principle that "everything succeeds which attacks favorable opportunity with fitting endeavor," then we see that it was the strong vitality, the active intelligence, and the indefinable psychological law of moral growth that assimilates the good and rejects the bad, which Nature gave this obscure child, that carried him to the service of mankind and to the admiration of the centuries with the same certainty with which the acorn grows to be the oak.

We see how even the limitations of his environment helped the end. Self-reliance, that most vital characteristic of the pioneer, was his by blood and birth and training; and developed through the privations of his lot and the genius that was in him to the mighty

strength needed to guide our great country through the titanic struggle of the Civil War.

The sense of equality was his, also by virtue of his pioneer training—a consciousness fostered by life from childhood to manhood in a state of society where there were neither rich to envy nor poor to despise, where the gifts and hardships of the forest were distributed impartially to each, and where men stood indeed equal before the forces of unsubdued nature.

The same great forces taught liberality, modesty, charity, sympathy-in a word, neighborliness. In that hard life, far removed from the artificial aids and comforts of civilization, where all the wealth of Croesus, had a man possessed it, would not have sufficed to purchase relief from danger, or help in time of need, neighborliness became of prime importance. A good neighbor doubled his safety and his resources, a group of good neighbors increased his comfort and his prospects in a ratio that grew like the cube root. Here was opportunity to practise that virtue that Christ declared to be next to the love of God-the fruitful injunction to "love thy neighbor as thyself."

Here, too, in communities far from the customary restraints of organized law, the common native intelligence of the pioneer was brought face to face with primary and practical questions of natural right. These men not only understood but appreciated the American doctrine of self-government. It was this understanding, this feeling, which taught Lincoln to write: "When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government that is despotism"; and its philosophic corollary: "He who would be no slave must consent to have no slave."