POWER IN LONELINESS

JUDGE PETER STENGER GROSSCUP

HERE has been no narrative of Lincoln's life yet written

that one feels to be adequate; no adequate portrayal of his character; no adequate portrayal of his face. Behind the life, and the character, and the face that we associate with Lincoln, as behind the stars that stand out in the depths of the night, a vaster depth extends that makes of what we see a faint impression only of what we feel must be behindthat links that figure into the mysterious order of the universe. And yet, "born in Kentucky, February 12, 1809; reared in Indiana; practised law in Illinois; was in Legislature and in Congress one term"-such would have been the mention of the name, "Abraham Lincoln," in any short "History of Illinois," and no mention at all in any other "History," had Lincoln died at the present age of President Roosevelt.

Slavery was the nation's inherited disease. It had crept into our national life as disease sometimes creeps into health, firmly fastened before alarm is created. From the beginning, of course, it was a wrong-a deep injustice done by men to other men and as such, aroused the conscience of thinking men. But from the beginning, also, it was an institution of the land, grown up under the law, and as such claimed the toleration that thinking men give, out of respect to the law. And for the early period of the Republic, this conscience of thinking men and this respect for law that thinking men are never without, compromised on a line that divided between them the continent of America.

But as the Western half of the continent opened for settlement, the line of compromise vanished. This Western half was a domain belonging to the nation-to the South as well as to the North-and into it, carrying all that the law allowed them to possess at home, even as the people of the North

might carry all that the law allowed them to possess at home, the people of the South claimed access. "Can this be right?" asked conscience. "It is the law," said a majority of the Supreme Court, when given a chance to speak upon the matter. The crisis had come. The public mind was brought standstill, to take a new survey of the changed situation lay before it; and upon the result of that new survey, in the realm of decided law in conflict with eternal human right, turned the destiny of America, the destiny of free government the world over.

It was here that Lincoln came into the public view. F* the mission that lay before him, his life, instead of being poor, had been rich in helpful circumstance. Born in the midst of slavery, he knew the institution on its human side, as the North did not know it. Reared among those who were poor, in the free States of Indiana and Illinois, he realized by experience how deeply human, also, was the consciousness of every man that he had a right to the bread he earned in the sweat of his brow. Living his life among the plain people, he knew that on any great matter of human right, the mind and the heart of the plain people the country over, being once aroused, were almost as one. This was the equipment given him by his heritage and his environment. It gave him what, in the preparation for a great part, is of infinitely more consequence than mere education or culture-a knowledge of the conditions and forces that were to be put at his command. And to this equipment, through circumstance, he brought a self-trained intellect, honest with itself, that, like the work of the self-trained carpenter building his own house, instead of going by rote, inspects and tests, and carefully measures every piece before it goes finally into the structure-an intellect that never accepted a conclusion that had not been tested with the hammer of honest inquiry, to see if it rang true; and that never offered an argument to the people that was not tested in the same way, and in their presence, that they, too, might see and hear that it rang exactly true. Indeed, the debates with Douglas, and the Cooper Union speech, are the highest examples in our his

tory, of political discussion put upon the plane of pains+aking, scientific, truth-seeking inquiry. And, finally, to all these qualities of intellect and environment, he joined an imaation that places him by the side of the Prophets

el; a steadfastness of purpose that showed, even ber the time came for its showing, that he could become a martyr; and a heart for mankind, second only to the heart of the Saviour of mankind.

How came that Convention in May, 1860, to find this Lincoln, and then name him as the country's deliverer? Partly be "use, more than any other man living, this plain Lincoln of the West, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates and in the Cooper Union speech, had taken hold upon the public mind. The public convictions that are really potential, often lie obscured for long reaches of time, under the repressive influences of politics or commercial interests. But let some one once truthfully and courageously proclaim them—give voice to what, in their inner thoughts, the people themselves are thinking-and that man at once becomes the people's spokesman. It was this Western Lincoln who thus spoke. He stood forth the one man of his time whose intellectual vision accurately sized up the crisis; the one man whose painstaking, honest logic brought the crisis, in all its inevitability, within the comprehension of the people; the one man who had found clear ground on which, at one and the same time, to stand for the right and for the law. And thus it was that a troubled nation, groping its way on this slavery question toward the light, came to feel at last that it had laid hold of the hand that knew in what direction the light lay.

But beyond this, Lincoln had been raised up, I believe providentially, for the work that awaited him; it is the consciousness, latent in us all, that this is true, that makes any human portrayal of him seem inadequate that makes what you see of him only an impression of what you feel must lie behind. I have spoken of the conditions that, before he was born, sowing the seeds from which his character was to spring, fore-ordered a man equipped for the work that

awaited him. That was not mere chance. I have spoken of his self-trained intellect-an intellect that, trained in the schools, would have lost the necessity of testing, in its own way and for its own conscience, everything that came within its range; and in that loss would have been lost the strange power that gave to Lincoln his hold on the public mind. That was not mere chance. I have spoken of his love of Truth-his willingness always to abide by it, his fixed determination that others should be obliged to abide by it. That was not mere chance. There was one thing more in the preparation of this man for a crisis that was not mere chance.

When God was raising up a leader to bring the children of Abraham out of the land where they were bondsmen, he led Moses, first as a waif into the house of the King, and then as a fugitive into the land of Midian, where, as a tender of flocks, he dwelt on the far side of the desert up against Mount Horeb. How long Moses was there, the desert on one side and the wilderness of the mountain on the other, enveloped in as great a loneliness as if the whole earth were void of life save him and his flock, we are not told. It is enough to know that it was not into the King's palace, but into this loneliness of desert and mountain, that the divine spark penetrated, lighting that flame in the midst of the bush.

From beginning to end, in the preparation of Lincoln for the work that awaited him-and then again when the work was actually upon him, that he might be kept equal to its exactions-he, too, was kept deeply enveloped in an atmosphere of Aloneness. Alone as a boy, separated by tragedy from his father's companionship, and by poverty from the companionship of those who would have interested him; alone as a young man in an Indiana clearing, hearing no voice of neighbor for weeks at a time, except the distant axe as it fell in muffled notes in the woodland beyond; alone as a grown man, pathetically out of place between the barrels and the counter of a country store, patiently striving to find his place, as, buried in the grasses of the wide and lonely

prairie, he lapped up every pool of knowledge on which he chanced-Euclid's Geometry, Clay's Speeches, Blackstone -devouring every book that came his way, simply from thirst for knowledge, without settled purpose, or settled order; alone as President-that one brain and that one heart charged with responsibility for each recurring phase of a mighty war, and for each recurring problem of the nation's peace, charged with responsibility to God and all mankind that free government should not perish from the earth-Oh, the loneliness of Lincoln, the tragic loneliness of that great life! Destined, in the very nature of his burden, to walk alone always—wherever he was, on frontier or in the Capital, the world pushed back-that into the stillness of the one life, upon whom such destiny depended, no influence should enter that came not laden with the wisdom of the Eternal One!

Saint-Gaudens has caught this phase of this great life in the statue shortly to be erected here in Grant Park. Seated in the chair of state, one of his long hands reaching well out on one of the long legs, the furrowed homely face drawn into itself in deep meditation, is the figure of the President; and at effective distance on either side, to mark off the isolation of this figure from the world, rise two tall marble columns. To those of us who have seen the monument set up, in its entirety, at Saint-Gaudens's home at Cornish, the portrayal is complete-Lincoln living in bronze, as Lincoln lived his life, Power in Loneliness.

And here, as long as this city stands, will this figure of Lincoln endure. He is no longer alone. Before him stretches the city. Around him is the nation. Above him are the skies. Behind him an inland sea, stretching away to the sky. Around him play the winds. On his brow alight messengers from the sun. The waves speak to him from the deep, the birds from the air. On every side, as in the flame of fire out of the bush, God speaks. He is not alone. Lincoln, living, was not alone. Where God is, man is not alone,,