morals. He would not lie, nor permit his political opponents to lie. What is right? What is truth? were tests he always applied to the solution of social and political problems. Finding for himself the answers to these questions, no power could turn him from advocating the right and proclaiming the truth.

An incident is related which shows his native honesty, even in his boyhood days. His stepsister, Matilda Johnston, followed Abe one morning as he went into the forest to clear a piece of land. She was then in her 'teens, and, like the other Johnston children, was fond of Abe. The mother had forbidden Matilda to go away that morning from the cabin, but the girl escaped her mother's watchful eye, unknown to Abe. Slyly creeping through the dense undergrowth, she sprang upon the boy with such sudden force as to bring them both to the ground. In falling, the girl's ankle came in contact with the keen edge of the axe. Abe staunched the blood with strips of cloth torn from his shirt and from her dress. Then turning to Matilda he asked: "What are you going to tell your mother about this?" "I'll tell her that I did it with the axe," she sobbed; "that will be the truth, won't it?" "Yes, that's the truth, but not all the truth," Abe responded.

"Tell the whole truth, Tilda, and trust your mother for the rest."

The same uncompromising spirit of truth and devotion to righteousness was shown at every stage of his career, and never more clearly than nearly forty years later in his Cooper Institute speech on the 27th of February, 1860. In dissecting with merciless logic the threats of the proslavery advocates to destroy the Union if a Republican President was elected, he said:

If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its universality. If it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension. All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right. All we ask they could readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy.

These pregnant sentences lifted the slavery controversy out of mere sectional and partisan contention to the lofty heights of pure morality. The politicians of the day did not relish this plain setting-forth of truth. Their aim was to confine political discussions to property rights, to economic questions, to industrial conditions, North and South, and thus make the controversy a battle

of brains over technical questions, over constitutions, statutes, and vested rights. They also wished to keep the political arena exclusively for technical legerdemain to the end that the common people might be made to believe that the issues were beyond their comprehension. Who, and what, was this Lincoln that he, with a sentence, should brush aside these technicalities, and lift the dominant issue of the time into the exalted sphere of political morality? Who? The man who had learned his morality at his mother's knee, as she thumbed the pages of her Bible and taught her children its sublime truths.

In this, his eleventh year, his personality planted upon a firm moral basis, began an amazing physical development which continued until at his majority he stood six feet four inches in height. The labour to which he was forced by the poverty of his youth toughened his muscles and sinews, and made him a physical giant. His was a physique to match his mind. His power of concentration of thought was so great that often he was literally lost in profound abstraction. His genius for analysis and his ability to state a case with clarity have never been surpassed.

When he was about to begin his debates with Douglas, many of his friends were honestly

alarmed. Scarcely one but feared a failure. Hardly, however, had that titanic contest started when opinion at home gradually changed in Lincoln's favour, while in all parts of the country men began to realize that a great man had been called forth by the hour to meet the new emergency. Miss Tarbell has discovered a letter written by a statesman in the East to some friend in the middle East asking: "Do you realize that no greater speeches have been made on public questions in the history of our country; that his knowledge of the subject is profound, his logic unanswerable, his style inimitable?"

Both his physical and mental development were dominated by an imperative spiritual influence. His inherent mystical temperament might, perhaps, have been abnormally developed, had it not been for the practical wisdom of his step-mother. It was she who drew him away from too constant introspection and melancholy, directing his mind toward the acquirement of practical knowledge.

Hazel Dorsey was his first teacher during the few weeks he regularly attended school when in his eleventh year. Owing to the pressing necessities of the Lincoln family, Abe was not again permitted to attend school until his fourteenth year, when Andrew Crawford was his schoolmaster.

This was his last term in school. Study with him was, however, continuous. Having acquired a taste for learning, he pursued it with an eagerness and interest that never lagged.

So insatiable was his thirst for education that he was known to trudge seven miles to borrow an English grammar. Then, stretched upon the cabin floor, before an open fireplace, an ungainly figure clad in coarse garments, he studied his borrowed grammar and his arithmetic. His slate was a wooden scoop-shovel which, when covered with figures, he would shave clean with his father's drawing knife or jack plane. Thus the lad may be said to have scooped knowledge into his capacious head.

Such were the conditions under which the character of Abraham Lincoln gradually unfolded. The eagerness to learn, the love of truth, the reverence for things sacred, the disposition to investigate, his patience under rebuke, his latent humour, which preserved his sense of proportion, his sensitiveness to suffering, the heroism with which his burdensome tasks were borne-all contributed to the formation of a composite man. Withal he was light-hearted, humorous, witty, but never frivolous. Through all, his face was turned toward the light and his pensive eyes looked