wealth, the wealth produced belongs to the men who produce it. One thing ought to be noted, which is that the laboring men of England recognized in Lincoln a friend of labor. The Civil War brought great hardships in the cotton mills of England, and England's temptation to recognize the Confederacy was strong. Henry Ward Beecher went to England and pleaded with the working men, who were at first very unwilling to hear him. His message was in effect what Lowell had said in his Biglow Papers: Laborin' man and laborin' woman The fight of the North for a free nation was stated strongly as a reason why England should suffer economic loss, if necessary, rather than support a moral wrong. It brought great joy to Lincoln when the cotton operatives of Lancashire, to the number of six thousand, at a meeting in Manchester, on New Year's Eve, in 1862, urged Lincoln to abolish slavery, and refused to petition Her Majesty's Government to recognize the cause of the South. On January 19, 1863, Lincoln replied to the Manchester working men in a letter which displayed sincere gratification. In March, 1864, the Workingmen's Association of New York City made him an honorary member, following the lead of a convention of trade unionists who, assembled in Philadelphia as early as 1861, pledged Lincoln their support and urged the abolition of slavery. These evidences of the appreciation of working men, Lincoln, himself a working man, received with genuine interest and appreciation. The main lines of Lincoln's views on labor appear to have been laid down in his notes in 1854, developed in his Cincinnati speech of September 17, 1859, and enlarged upon in an address not quite two weeks later before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in Milwaukee. They are the same that he wrought into his First Annual Message to Congress, and to which he referred near the end of his life, in his letter to the New York working men as the views which he still held and to which he could add little. These are the important authentic utterances of Lincoln on labor and are consistent throughout. As he defined his views they are virtually these: Free labor is better, more righteous and more remunerative than slave labor. Labor is prior to capital and superior to it; but there is no inevitable antagonism between them, nor any unalterable division of men in America into permanent classes as capitalists or laborers. The laborer has a right to aspire to be a capitalist, and should act toward capital as he will wish laborers to act toward him when he becomes a capitalist. But man is not a commodity; the rights of labor, while giving it no privilege to destroy capital, are more sacred than the rights which inhere in capital: for capital is the fruit of labor. As a laboring man, Lincoln was a friend of labor. As a man who had risen out of a condition of hard labor, he believed in ambition and aspiration for the laboring man. He believed in freedom because freedom is the mother of hope, and he wanted the privilege of hope preserved to all who perform honest labor. CHAPTER XXVIII LINCOLN THE ORATOR HAD Abraham Lincoln been everything else that he was and lacked his oratorical powers, he would never have been president of the United States. Oratory is now in disrepute. It has practically disappeared from political campaigns. It is a lost art in the court room. It is little better than a stranger in both Houses of Congress. As for the Supreme Court, an orator might as well transport himself to the Gizeh Museum and attempt to be eloquent in addressing the mummified Pharaohs as the judges of that high tribunal. The pulpit is still the throne of eloquence, though there are influences at work that would drive it from this last place of vantage. Eloquence is the finest of the fine arts. The organs of speech are wholly other than the organs by which speech is received and interpreted; the lips and the ear are so constructed as not to suggest any possible relationship between them. Yet by a miracle in the presence of which all men must stand in wonder, sounds produced by one set of organs are capable of registering their effects upon the other in such manner that one man may speak and another may listen and the souls of the two be stirred by the same emotion. One man standing where a thousand others can hear him may see in their faces the effect of his words, and know that they are thinking his thoughts and are swayed by his passion and joining in his high resolves. He has no brush and palette; no mallet and chisel; no instrument of music, but he is privileged to do what the painter, the sculptor, the musician can never do, or do in part only. It is said that when Lincoln was a boy he returned home from religious services and mimicked the preachers. The mirthful aspects of his performance appear to have impressed his cousin Dennis Hanks more deeply than any serious element which the preaching may have contained. It need not be inferred, however, that the boy's love of fun was the sole reason for these imitations. The mannerisms of the backwoods preacher could hardly have failed to excite his mirth; but beside his ridicule there was some real appreciation of the value of public discourse and aspiration to influence men through public speech. His corn-field oratory was a ready invitation to the other boys to drop their hoes and listen, and was more appreciated by them than it was by Thomas Lincoln, whose corn needed hoeing. During his boyhood Abraham now and then made his way to Rockport, the county-seat of Spencer County, Indiana, and there as also at Boonville, in the adjacent county of Warrick, he heard lawyers addressing juries. His court-room experience in this period, however, was limited, while regularly once a month there was preaching at the Little Pigeon church, and often more than one preacher spoke at the service. By the time Abraham was of age, he had some local reputation as a public speaker; for, in the summer of 1830, John Hanks made the confident boast that Abraham could make a better political address than one which had just been delivered at Decatur; and Abraham, nothing loath, mounted a stump and made a speech. His experience in the debating society at New Salem gave him opportunity for the preparation of argumentative addresses, and his experience in the store brought him almost daily opportunity for discussion. We do not know of any significant address delivered by Lincoln as a member of the Legislature; but we do know of his candidacy for reelection once in two years and of the growing appreciation which people showed of his power of speech. His campaign addresses of these years are not preserved, and we are quite sure that their destruction involves no serious loss. We have samples enough of Lincoln's early rhetoric and descriptions of his early stump-speaking to assure us that their value was chiefly in the preparation afforded for something better. He followed in those days the style which he supposed to be most cogent and effective. It was a stilted, artificial type of oratory, and Lincoln in time outgrew it. We have many anecdotes concerning his court-room eloquence. His power with juries lay first in his power of fair and clear statements, his ability to strip a subject of its incidentals and to display it in its fundamental attributes. His homely good sense and man-to-man attitude commended him not only to the intelligence but the favorable judgment of juries. Of his fund of humor we shall have occasion to speak in a chapter by itself. It is to be noted, however, that Lincoln seldom told stories or cracked jokes in his more serious addresses. The proof of this is to be found in all the published editions of his speeches. A tradition is current in the county-seats where Lincoln was most frequently heard, to the effect that juries learned not to look for stories when Lincoln was entirely certain that the law and evidence were on his side. When Lincoln had a good clear case and could cite the evidence and the statutes, he found little occasion to tell stories. Lincoln's temperance address delivered in Springfield on Washington's birthday in 1842, and his address on the Perpetuation of our Political Institutions, delivered before the Young Men's Lyceum on January 27, 1837, are sufficient indication of the character of his prepared discourses while he was yet a young lawyer in Springfield. In these days a new member of Congress is not expected to obtain the floor during his first term, unless it be in a night session just before the adjournment of Congress when he may be permitted to rise and address the chairman pro tem and ask leave to extend his remarks in print in order that he may have some campaign literature to send to his constituents and assist toward his reelection. It was not so in Lincoln's day. Very |