law allowed. He was disposed to believe, if there was any fault, it was at our own door. He had just read the Message of the Governor of Indiana, in which he called the attention of their legislature to the enormous expenditure of twelve thousand dollars for public printing. Thus it would seem that in our sister state, with a population doubling ours, twelve thousand dollars was called an enormous expenditure, whilst we, with only half the population and doubly more embarrassed, were paying twenty thousand dollars for the same object! To remove all suspicion of his having the management of this committee for the purpose of making a party matter of it, he desired that the chair would not appoint him upon the committee."

It is worth while noting that during the later years of his service in the legislature Lincoln was chairman of the finance committee and that as a result of this he frequently spoke on the subject of state finance, one of his speeches

from 1837, the only one reported in full, dealing with the banking system. Lincoln was also closely identified with the movement for developing the resources of the state, especially by increasing the means of communication by water and rail, and he seems to have shown no more foresight and self-restraint than his fellow members in supporting measures financially unsound, for the furtherance of these interests. In this one instance Lincoln's judgment was overshadowed by his enthusiasm. In marked contrast to this interest in financial questions during the legislative period is his apparent indifference to the subject when on the stump and, with one exception, in Congress. During the presidency, too, he seems to have left these matters to his Secretaries of the Treasury.

X

CHAPTER II

ON THE PLATFORM AND IN CONGRESS

DURING the early period of his public speaking Lincoln showed a tendency that is in marked contrast to the simplicity and restraint of his later writings, a rhetorical tendency, which may fairly be regarded as a sort of infantile writer's disease, verbal mumps or measles. It will be recalled that Shakespeare shows a similar fondness for fine writing of a different sort in his earliest comedy, "Love's Labour's Lost." This outbreak occurs, not in connection with the political speeches proper, but in a form which the later Lincoln seldom used the occasional address. Lincoln might properly have paraphrased the words of Marc Antony and said, "I am no orator, as Webster or Everett is." Like Clay, he never seems to

have sought occasions to speak in public and when he did speak he usually had some immeddiate end in view. He once said, during the x presidential period, "I believe I shall never be old enough to speak without embarrassment when I have nothing to talk about." He spoke, not to entertain or to impress, but to persuade and convince his hearers. In his speaking he> suggests the lawyer addressing the jury rather than an orator appearing before an audience. We find not a single Independence Day ora-x tion and, if he had survived the Civil War, it is doubtful whether he would have cared to speak at Memorial Day meetings. His presence at the Gettysburg celebration was official, and he spoke there simply becausey his position required him to speak. The oicial orator of the day was not Lincoln but Everett, although the supreme court of posterity has failed to sustain the action of the committee on arrangements and has given first place to Lincoln's brief remarks.

The earliest specimen of rhetorical speech

that has been preserved is the address before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, of January 23, 1837, and its subject is "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions." The opening sentence is what Lincoln himself might later have called "highfalutin'": "In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running date of the nineteenth century." This eulogy of our country is more suggestive of Mr. Jefferson Brick than of Lincoln, as we know him now: "All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa, combined with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, ith a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

But the speech is not all mere rhetoric, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." In the description of the fathers of the American Revolution there is a passage not unworthy of the later Lincoln at his best: