comprehended by men who boasted that they, too, were hewn from the same rough quarry and who flattered themselves that they, too, might have expanded to the same grandeur.

Yet, even these could not hide the fact that Lincoln had been always a being apart-friendly, sociable, kindly, helpful; but singularly, although not offensively, unlike his neighbors. The strength of a giant was the servant of "a heart as big as his arms were long." Like Garibaldi, the hero of United Italy, he could not bear the sight or sound of needless suffering. Bigger and stronger than any of his companions, he was the gentlest of them all. But the quality of his mind was wholly different from theirs; indeed it was of a quality exceedingly rare in the whole world. Lincoln had marvellous mental eyesight. He looked not so much at things as into them. His vision was not only accurate, but penetrating. It was a vision unblurred by his own hasty fancies or his own wishes; and a vision undimmed by prevalent misstatements or current misconceptions; a vision never long perturbed by the sophistries of men skilled to make "the worse appear the better reason."

Referring once to the declaration of Galileo that a ball dropped and a ball shot from the mouth of a cannon would strike the ground at the same instant, Lincoln said that long before he knew the reasons for it, it seemed to him that it must be so. Like Galileo, he saw the thing before and not merely after it was proved. He saw that the downward pull on both balls must be the same, and that the outward drive of the one had nothing whatever to do with the time of its fall. We may indeed wonder what might have been his career, if, like Michael Faraday, he had first read books of science instead of the Revised Statutes of Illinois or the Commentaries of Blackstone that he found in a pile of rubbish. Fate decreed, however, that this rare quality of penetrative vision should be applied to law and to statecraft-especially to the problems then challenging the thought of the American people. This vision, moreover, was not only penetrative; it was prophetic. He could foresee consequences as distinctly as he could discern realities. It was not pure guessing, when he exclaimed, "This government cannot endure permanently half

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Facsimile of Manuscript Tribute from Dr. Charles J. Little,
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free and half slave." It was a prediction derived from steady and consecutive vision. For genuine logic, like the logic of Euclid which fascinated him, is, after all, a continuous seeing. Given the elements of a situation, the mind watches them as consequence follows consequence in sure and certain revelation. Never to befool oneself about an actual situation and never to be fool oneself in reasoning upon it-these are the bases of science, physical and political. And science is the modern almanac, the handbook of prediction. When men like Douglas were attempting to manipulate and thwart the laws of God which determine national destiny, Abraham Lincoln was humbly studying them in the spirit of Galileo and of Francis Bacon.

Daniel Webster once declared that it is wholly unnecessary to re-enact the laws of God. The saying, strictly construed, is true enough, but the implications of it, as Lincoln saw, are utterly false. We need not, indeed, re-enact the laws of God, but our statutes, if they shall work benefit and not disaster, must recognize and conform to them. The laws of God, left to themselves, leave us in impotence, and exposed to hunger, disease and disaster. All our mastery of the physical world depends upon our actively using, not upon our passively submitting to, the laws of the material universe. In this sense every flying locomotive is a re-enactment of the laws of God; so is every telescope that opens to mortal vision the splendors of immensity, and every microscope with which we track to their hiding places the mysteries of life and death. So is every temple that we rear, every bridge that we build, every steamship that we construct, every mill that we erect, and every machine into which we conduct the energy of steam or electricity. The whole progress of civilized man may be measured by the extent to which he has learned in his activities to obey and to employ the laws of God. So, too, in the political world, the great structures that we call commonwealths must, in this sense, be re-enactments of eternal principles. If they are to be beneficent and not malignant, those who create and control them must learn the laws by which alone benign results can be obtained. Constitutions can en

dure and statutes increase the welfare of the people only as they realize and do not contravene the principles of righteousness and progress. Penetrating to this simple but tremendous truth, Lincoln obtained his vision of the future; his prophetic gaze swept the political horizon and discerned the inevitable. And this foresight was both profound and far-reaching. In learned information his horizon might be termed a narrow one; but in his grasp of principles and of their ultimate and universal consequences he was broader and deeper than any statesman of his age. The only time I ever saw him was at the flag-raising in Philadelphia, on Washington's birthday, in 1861. I could not hear his voice, so great was the intervening crowd, but the words that I could not hear I have read and pondered often since:

"I never have had a feeling politically," said the predestined martyr for whom assassins even then were lying in wait, "that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. that sentiment . . . which gave liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to all the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. Now, my friends, can this country be saved on that basis? . . . If it cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it."

If this be narrowness of vision, then may God contract the eyes of American statesmen to a similar horizon!

Such was the mind of Abraham Lincoln-a mind that gravitated gladly to the truth of things; a mind that loved light and hated darkness; a mind that found rest only in eternal principles, and inspiration in prophetic visions and exalted political ideals.

Possibly under different surroundings he might have become a renowned scientist; more probably his radiant and steady intellect, united to his great heart would have made him even under other conditions a supreme statesman. For the scientist seeks chiefly for causes and is satisfied to find and to show them; if he concerns himself for beneficent results, as he often does, these are not his principal quest.