ent enter upon office with less means at
his command, outside his own strength of heart and steadiness of
understanding, for inspiring confidence in the people, and so winning
it for himself, than Mr. Lincoln. All that was known of him was that he
was a good stump-speaker, nominated for his _availability_,--that is,
because he had no history,--and chosen by a party with whose more
extreme opinions he was not in sympathy. It might well be feared that a
man past fifty, against whom the ingenuity of hostile partisans could
rake up no accusation, must be lacking in manliness of character, in
decision of principle, in strength of will; that a man who was at best
only the representative of a party, and who yet did not fairly
represent even that, would fail of political, much more of popular,
support. And certainly no one ever entered upon office with so few
resources of power in the past, and so many materials of weakness in
the present, as Mr. Lincoln. Even in that half of the Union which
acknowledged him as President, there was a large and at that time
dangerous minority, that hardly admitted his claim to the office, and
even in the party that elected him there was also a large minority that
suspected him of being secretly a communicant with the church of
Laodicea. All that he did was sure to be virulently attacked as ultra
by one side; all that he left undone, to be stigmatized as proof of
lukewarmness and backsliding by the other. Meanwhile, he was to carry
on a truly colossal war by means of both; he was to disengage the
country from diplomatic entanglements of unprecedented peril
undisturbed by the help or the hindrance of either, and to win from the
crowning dangers of his administration, in the confidence of the
people, the means of his safety and their own. He has contrived to do
it, and perhaps none of our Presidents since Washington has stood so
firm in the confidence of the people as he does after three years of
stormy administration.

Mr. Lincoln's policy was a tentative one, and rightly so. He laid down
no programme which must compel him to be either inconsistent or unwise,
no cast-iron theorem to which circumstances must be fitted as they
rose, or else be useless to his ends. He seemed to have chosen
Mazarin's motto, _Le temps et moi_. The _moi_ to be sure, was not very
prominent at first; but it has grown more and more so, till the world
is beginning to be persuaded that it stands for a character of marked
in