was not the successful candidate? As events have proved, does any one believe that he has comprehended the struggle with a keener insight or with a broader grasp? He has held the first place in the cabinet and done good service there; some of us have sometimes thought that he had too much influence with the president for the president's goodthat he was in reality president. But when the facts are all known, we shall find that the Western lawyer was never overmatched in his cabinet by the shrewd, cultivated, experienced, philosophic statesman of New York. Nor would Chase have made a stronger president for the crisis. His policy, in some respects, from the outset might have been bolder and more radical; personally, in the early stages of the war, it might have suited you and me better; but it would have inevitably put him at the head of a party rather than at the head of the loyal nation; and with all our admiration and reverence for him, we may well doubt whether he could have led the country through these four years of perils on the right hand and on the left so safely as it has been led under its actual leader. We have had, too, the benefit of his strength in the cabinet.

And other strong men, officially and unofficially, have stood as advisers of the president. Yet he has stood the real head of the nation, clear and clean above them all. No ruler was ever readier to listen to opinions from all quarters, to admit all comers, and give every class of men and every party and every individual citizen a chance to be heard. But all these opinions went through the crucible of his own keen judgment, and came out into deed through his own will, if they ever came out at all. His cabinet officers

sometimes complained that they were not even advisers, but only clerks, so independently did he frequently act of them. During Buchanan's administration, and for many years preceding, the policy of the government and all its great measures were decided by a vote of the cabinet, the president making himself strictly the executive of the will of the majority. Lincoln, from the outset, made the cabinet only an advisory body, seeking their advice or not according to his feeling of need, and in any event reserving to himself the right of decision. Sometimes he consulted a part without the knowledge of the rest; sometimes took important steps without the knowledge of any of them. But equally, whether acting by their advice or not, the responsibility was always his, and he was willing and sought to bear it, not for ambition's but for conscience' sake, before the country and the world. Congress passed a resolution of censure against a member of his cabinet: immediately he sent a message to Congress, announcing that the acts censured were his,—and the country, though it had been clamorous against the secretary, said directly that the president was right. Again, a furious party were crying down the secretary of war for withholding supplies from, and secretly plotting against the success of, their favorite general: the president, in a public speech, said that he himself had done the deeds complained of, and the people were silenced. He declared the report of a cabinet-officer to Congress to be his own, and changed it, if it ran counter to his own ideas. And so, generally, he never shrank from taking upon himself any responsibility in the conduct of affairs that the emergency demanded. He initiated measures and assumed powers that in any other

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time but that of war would have been in clear contravention of the Constitution; and sometimes his habit of free and solitary action, even when there seemed to be no great emergency, alarmed the friends of the administration and excited the constitutional jealousy of Congress. And in any other man almost, in a selfish and ambitious man, such á habit would have been dangerous. But in him it was so balanced by transparent integrity, and unselfish, conscientious devotion to the country's good, that the people instinctively felt, whatever the opposing politicians might say, that the alarm was groundless and even ludicrous. Yet it was well, perhaps, that there were such sharp critics even among the friends of the administration, as Wade and Chandler and Winter Davis, to keep the old moorings of the Constitution and the powers and dignities of Congress in sight, that the people might easily lay hold of them again, in the event of a really dangerous man assuming arbitrary power.

Now these acts and ways of the late president are the acts and ways of a man of large original individuality and strength. Not speaking of them now either to censure or to praise, but simply as evidence of character and capacity, they denote a man of great personal power; of large native resources; of inherent ability to lead and command,—a man of independent thought and energy and will,—a man, who, though standing among strong men, impressed them more than he was impressed by them, and so showed himself stronger than they all. He impressed himself also upon events; and, though wisely accepting their teachings—indeed, by accepting their teachings-kept himself always above them, and held them in a manner within his control. He

was strong enough to disregard custom and precedent and fashion, the politic ways of more experienced statesmen, and the secret arts of diplomacy, and to walk in a path of his own appointing, -to hew out his way, indeed, as he went along. And this he did with no bluster of innovation, with no appearance of meeting antagonistic forces, but with the quiet modesty and easy self-possession and assurance of true greatness. He did it from the sheer greatness of his manhood, from the sheer strength and power of the native stuff out of which the individuality of his manhood was developed. We have not always, I know, accorded to him this commanding ability. But history, I believe, will correct our decision: we are already correcting it ourselves.

Next, we are to inquire more particularly what were the elements of this large, commanding individuality? through what special faculties came this general efficiency?

First, as to the intellectual. Dividing the intellect into the intuitive, or philosophical, intellect; the imaginative, or poetical, intellect; and the logical, or practical, intellect, — we should not claim for Mr. Lincoln any remarkable development of the two former divisions. In the imaginative and poetical faculties, he was deficient. He seems to have had · little appreciation of the beautiful in any of its forms. He was as plain and rugged in his style of writing and thought as in his person and manners. He was entirely wanting in intellectual enthusiasm. His state papers, for the most part, though on subjects dear to his heart and of great popular interest, have been cold and practical only, and though satisfactory in substance, have awakened little popular emotion. More imagination would have enhanced his

power. It would have given him an enthusiasm, a warmth. a consciousness something like the heroic of the magnitude of events and of his own part in them, which the people have missed, and to which they would have responded with a more buoyant patriotism. It might have made him even to their consciousness the leader and hero that he actually was, so that he could have carried the country with greater ease than he did through some of the valleys of despondency and over the mountainous difficulties of the four years' struggle.

Nor should we claim for President Lincoln any remarkable development of the intuitive, or philosophical, intellect. He was no metaphysician. He seldom traced even the great principles upon which he acted back to their absolute sources or grasped them in their theoretical relations. In establishing his principles, he did not go back farther than was necessary for the practical purpose in hand. He relied more upon observation and experience than upon intuition. Compared with Mr. Seward in respect to this division of the intellect, he was inferior: yet perhaps the inferiority did not make him the worse leader for the times. Compared with Jefferson in this particular, he would fall far short; with Washington, he might stand on about the same level.

But his practical and logical intellect was extraordinary. He had wonderful greatness and quickness of understanding,—an immense amount of common sense. In this was concentrated the whole force of his mental nature: and here lay one of the main elements of his individual power. Seward stood far below him in this regard; and so, when it