From a volunteer against Indian insurgents, he became the mover of vast armies, and met with firmness, patience and skill the most harassing exigencies of a great civil war. Beginning as a stump speaker and corner-grocery debater, he lived to take his place in the front rank of immortal orators. It was this power of compassing the most trying situations that made the brief and crowded space of four years suffice for him to accomplish a task that generations had been preparing, and which, to use his own words, before assuming the presidency, “offered more difficulties than had devolved upon Washington."

But, to struggle was not new to him. His whole life had been a series of obscure but heroic struggles, and it may safely be said that no man of Lincoln's historical stature ever passed through a more checkered or more varied career. It fills one with astonishment to follow the vocations that successively fell to the lot of this extraordinary man, since, as a boy, in 1826, he left the school (to reach which he walked nine miles every day), to the sad hour when, in 1865, he perished, as President of the United States. Beginning as a farm laborer, studying at night by the light of the fire, he was the hostler, he ground corn, he built fires and he cooked-all for thirty-one cents a day. In 1827, he is recorded as an athlete of local renown, while, at the same time, he was a writer on temperance and a champion of the

integrity of the American Union. In 1830, we are told that he undertook "to split for Mrs. Nancy Miller four hundred rails for every yard of brown jean, dyed with walnut bark, that would be required to make him a pair of trousers.' He next turned his attention to public speaking-beginning his career as orator standing on an empty keg at Decatur. Next we find him, in turn, a Mississippi boatman, a clerk at the polls, a salesman, a debater in frontier debating clubs, a militia captain in the Black Hawk War, a private for a month in a volunteer spy company, and an unsuccessful candidate for the Legislature. In 1832, he seriously thought of becoming a blacksmith, but he changed his views, and bought a country store on credit. Ruined by a drunken partner, he failed, but, as money came to him, he paid his honest debts-discharging the last note in 1849. We next find him qualifying as a land surveyor, after six weeks' study. In 1833, he is appointed postmaster at New Salem, using his hat as a postoffice. He was also, as occasion called, a referee and umpire, the unquestioned judge in all local disputes, wagers and horse races. Having read law, he became a lawyer. In 1834, he was a successful candidate for the Legislature of Illinois, and, as a member of it, protested against slavery. Challenged about this time to fight a duel, he became reconciled with his adversary and married Miss Mary Todd, after constitut

ing himself her champion. Defeated as candidate for Congress, in 1843, he was returned in 1846. About this time he patented a novel steamboat. In 1854, he sought without success to be appointed General Land Commissioner. Subsequently, he is seen engaged vigorously in State politics, opposing Judge Douglas in a debate that attracted national attention, and that gave him the nomination for the Presidency of the United States.

The face of Lincoln told the story of his life-a life of sorrow and struggle, of deep-seated sadness, of ceaseless endeavor. It would have taken no Lavater to interpret the rugged energy stamped on that uncomely plebeian face, with its great crag-like brows and bones, or to read there the deep melancholy that overshadowed every feature of it.

Even as President of the United States, at a period when the nation's peril invested the holder of the office with almost despotic power, there seems to have been in Lincoln's nature a modesty and lack of desire to rule which nothing could lessen or efface. Wielding the power of a king, he retained the modesty of a commoner.

And, surely, it is not among the least remarkable of her achievements, that American Democracy should have produced great statesmen and great soldiers, when called for by great events, who, as a rule, have been free from that dangerous ambition

which has tainted the fairest names of European history. If we have not had our age of Pericles, of Augustus or of Leo, we can boast of a history that has given us, within the period of a century, the patriotism of a Washington, a Lincoln and a Grant.

If we may believe tradition, Lincoln came from a stock which proves the hereditary source of his chief characteristics. His humor, his melancholy, his strange mingling of energy and indolence, his generosity, his unconventional character, his frugality, his tenderness, his courage, all are traceable to his ancestry as well as to the strange society which molded the boy and nerved the man to face without fear every danger that beset his path. He revealed to the old world a new type of man, of the AngloSaxon race, it is true, but modified by circumstances so novel and potent, and even dominating in their influence, as to mark a new departure in human character. Lincoln was the Lincoln was the type and representative of the "Western man "—an evolution of family isolation, of battles with primeval forces and the most savage races of men, of the loneliness of untrodden forests, of the absence of a potent public opinion, of a state of society in which only inherent greatness of human character was respected; in which tradition and authority went for naught, and courage and will were alone recognized as having rightful domina

tion. The peculiarities of this society were not less reflected in its character than in its tastes. Thus, in Lincoln, for example, Rabelais and Machiavelli, coarse wit and political cunning, were quite as conspicuous as that tenderness and self-abnegation which recall the early history of the Christian Church. The Western man, the American of the Western prairies and forests, could in no sense be termed a colonial Englishman, as a large class of cultivated Eastern Americans might not unjustly be described. England had no mortgage on the mind or character or manners of these children of the West. The Western settlers had no respect for English traditions or teachings, whether of Church or of State. Accustomed all their lives to grapple with nature face to face, they thought and they spoke, with all the boldness of unrestrained sincerity, on every topic of human interest or of sacred memory, without the slightest recognition of any right of external authority to impose restrictions, or even to be heard in protest against their intellectual independence. As their life developed the utmost independence of creed and individuality, he whose originality was the most fearless and self-contained was chief among them. blood of their blood and ing from them only in arose to rule the American people with a more than

Among such a people, bone of their bone, differstature, Abraham Lincoln