THE

XVIII.

SCHUYLER COLFAX.

'HE careers of good and of great men are the true beacons of human progress. They are lights set upon a hill, illuminating the moral atmosphere around them, and their thoughts and deeds hallow the nations to which they belong, and become the most priceless legacies of mankind. Thus Moses, David, Solomon, Plato, Socrates, Xenophon, Seneca, Cicero and Epictetus, still speak to us from their tombs even more impressively than when they lived and spoke and walked upon the earth. Indeed, as Carlyle taught us, universal history is, after all, only the history of great men; and Ralph Waldo Emerson insists, with remarkable force and with unquestioned truth, that every institution is but the lengthened shadow of some great man who has passed away, as the Islamism of Mohammed, the Protestantism of Luther, the Jesuitism of Loyola, the Puritanism of Calvin, the Methodism of Wesley, the Quakerism of Fox, and the universal emancipation.

From the very beginning he believed exactly as when at the end. He compressed a whole volume of

argument into the single, clear-cut and unanswerable sentence: "If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong."

Unanimously nominated for Senator by a representative State convention of Illinois, he startled and even alarmed many of his warmest and most enthusiastic friends by fearlessly advancing in his speech of acceptance far beyond their lines. With unparalleled boldness for those days and that region, he declared, in ringing sentences characteristic of the man who was to become the foremost character in American history, and as positively as if an indisputable and uncontested axiom, that famous political aphorism, that government could not stand divided against itself, half slave and half free. And in the debate that ensued with his great and talented antagonist, Stephen A. Douglas, he refused to retract or qualify a single word of this daring, defiant avowal. Thus did Lincoln become, unconscious to himself, the political prophet of the new dispensation about to open upon our land.

The success of the National cause was, with Mr. Lincoln as President, immeasurably higher than all other considerations, personal, political or humanitarian. Hence, because he did not believe the opportune moment had yet arrived, he refused, in 1861, to allow Secretary Cameron to arm the slaves, or Fremont, or Hunter, or Phelps to proclaim local

emancipation in the South. His favorite illustration in the discussions in those days with his confidential friends was, that a faithful surgeon must always strive to save both life and limb, even though the limb was gangrened and diseased; but when that was impossible, then, at all hazards, he must save life and sacrifice limb. His paramount duty was to save the life of the Union. He insisted, in his well-remembered reply to Greeley and others, that he could not strike at slavery until all other measures had failed. But at last, when forbearance had ceased to be a virtue, when every family altar was crimsoned with blood, every cemetery crowded with patriot graves, he felt the hour had struck, and he was ready.

Conversing with him one night in the telegraph office of the War Department, he suddenly turned the subject from campaigns and battles to mental idiosyncrasies, discussing the individualities of Thaddeus. Stevens, of Charles Sumner, and, last of all, Henry Wilson. After discussing the characteristics of others with a keenness of analysis that strikingly illustrated his own mental powers, he added that a peculiarity of his own life from his earliest manhood had been, that he habitually studied the opposite side of every disputed question, of every law case, of every political issue, more exhaustively, if possible, than his own side. He said that the result had been, that in all his long practice at the bar he had never once been sur