THE COURAGE OF CONVICTION-MANHOOD

AILURE is but the closed door to success-try again and you may open it. There is not one man in a thousand who succeeds the first time. We learn only by experience. No

matter how many times you have failed, the possibility for success is only greater the next time. It is not defeat that is dishonorable; it is giving up. Struggling to regain his lost foothold, Lincoln, at twentyfour years of age, earned by his honesty the postmastership at New Salem. The mails came but once or twice a week, and in the winter only once a month; the cheapest postage was six cents for thirty miles, and rose as high as twenty-five cents on a letter, according to the distance. The frontiersmen lived largely on credit and did not pay cash even for their letters, so that the postmaster had to carry the accounts. So humble was

this political office that Lincoln found it necessary to continue as a day laborer, and he took up surveying to add to his income, so that he might pay off the indebtedness of his failure in business. The foreclosure of a note given by him during his financial reverses resulted in the seizure of his horse, saddle and bridle, including his surveying instruments, leaving him again stripped of all the belongings he had in the world. The keenness of this humiliation wrote itself deep into his character. But his faith in man and in himself never wavered, and during the next election he again. accepted the nomination for the legislature and won.

Lincoln was now twenty-five years of age, and so poor that he had to borrow the money with which to buy suitable clothes to take his seat in the State Capitol at Springfield. No man has ever come into American politics under more adverse conditions. Here was a young legislator who had never lived in a town, who had never lived where there was a church, who had attended school hardly more than six months of his life, and whose entire income was not averaging $4.00 a week. It is this first impulse of political power that tests the character of a man. The temptation of joining the majority and stepping into immediate influence beset Lincoln in the same way that it lures the man of today. True to himself, and to those whom he loved, he took up the cause of the common people, creating a furor by agitating the emancipation of women from political thraldom, raising his his voice for freedom in a moral protest against slavery, and denouncing the citizenship that orders its politics according to personal rewards. He had reached the position in life where he had the courage of his convictions and that is Manhood.

The Portrait Life of Lincoln

PART II

A Photographic Narrative Which Interprets
the Character and Life of

Abraham Lincoln, the Greatest American

THE FOUNDATION OF LINCOLN'S CHARACTER ·

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HERE comes a moment in every man's life when he discovers himself; when he finds that the years of labor and experience have laid a foundation upon which he must stand, and that foundation is either strong or weak according to the manner in which he has

built it. We are today only what we made ourselves yesterday.

Lincoln was thirty-three years of age when he discovered his fixed position in life. And what a foundation he had laid! Built without tools or material, crude blocks of opportunity, he found himself standing before the burning heart of humanity, from which there is no turning back. Behind him were those long years of poverty and struggle, the Kentucky cabin, the savage wilds of Indiana, the prairies of Illinois; childhood of poverty, boyhood of toil, the wrestle with destiny. The people had claimed him as their own, and for the first time in his life he could now look straight ahead into the future. A youth of twenty-five years, he had been sent by his townspeople to represent them in the legislature of Illinois, and had allied himself with the cause of the downtrodden. The call of the larger town appealed to him. In his twenty-ninth year, he mounted a borrowed horse, and with all his worldly possessions in the saddlebags, rode away to Springfield to become a lawyer. Here he was again forced to fight his way through many misfortunes, but during his years in the halls of legislation he had made the acquaintance of men who were to become the nation's leaders.

It was here that Lincoln took his first stand against slavery, with but one member of the legislature in sympathy with him. His honesty and integrity at the bar brought him a law practice that allowed him to remove the indebtedness of his earlier life, and at thirty-three years of age he was maintaining himself through his own abilities. He had been eight years a legislator and had risen to the leadership of the Whig party, rejecting the nomination for the governorship. The fortunes of politics are as varied as those of war; when Lincoln first announced his ambition to be sent to Washington as a congressman, the honor was refused him by his party.

Struggle chisels its lines on the countenance of a man. Upon Lincoln's face there was now being written the story that was to become a nation's history. And as he sat for his first photograph, when the call of the people demanded the privilege of looking upon the features of the young lawyer who desired to carry their interests into the halls of congress, he realized that he no longer belonged to himself, but was now a servant of the great democracy. It was the face of prophecy.

THE INFLUENCE OF LOVE ON LINCOLN'S LIFE.

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HERE is no man so strong that he cannot be won by gentleness. The power of affection is the most subtle force in the world, and interwoven in the lives of all men, whether they be among the greatest or the most humble runs the silken thread of a woman's heart. It was this new world of tenderness that flooded its golden light on Lincoln and ignited new fires of ambition within him. It was when he first entered politics that he first felt the power of a woman's influence. The beauty and the character of little Anne Rutledge, daughter of the village tavernkeeper at New Salem, appealed to Lincoln, but while she admired his manliness and ambition she was betrothed to another. Her companionship with Lincoln is one of the love idylls in American history. The impress which it made upon his character lived with him throughout his life, for in it was written a tragedy. Lincoln's strong friendship for the girl finally won her heart, but in the midst of almost the first happiness which he had ever known his sweetheart fell sick and died. Lincoln was constantly with her during her last hours, and the last song that she sang was for him. The veil of darkness fell upon him, and in all the stirring events that beset his after life he never fully emerged from the melancholy, although her memory was one of his richest possessions. His grief for the dead girl was such that his friends feared that he was losing his mind.

The experience of Lincoln was not unlike that of many others who have saved themselves at such critical moments by summoning their will power to lift them from despair. Work is man's greatest friend. It has been the salvation of man since the world began. Lincoln turned to it in his time of need and entered earnestly into the political problems that were gathering like foreboding clouds over the nation, ardently supporting the moral principles that underly every public question of moment.

It was during these days in his yearning for companionship that he met and married Mary Todd, a Kentucky society girl, whose keen intuition saw in the poor and awkward young legislator a great political destiny. It was a turning point in his career, that fourth day in November in 1842, when this son of the woods, now thirty-three years of age, brought into his life this daughter of pride and social ambition, descended from governors and generals, who, then twenty-one years of age, exclaimed: "I mean to to make him President of the United States. You will see that, as I always told I will be the President's wife." Woman became in the life of Linyou, coln, as she is in the homes of the nation today, the power behind the throne.