t long
discouraging apprenticeship to greatness. Mentally, he had always been
in isolation. Socially, he had lived in a near horizon. The real tragedy
of his failure at Washington was in the closing against him of the
opportunity to know his country as a whole. Had it been Lincoln instead
of Douglas to whom destiny had given a residence at Washington during
the 'fifties, it is conceivable that things might have been different
in the 'sixties. On the other hand, America would have lost its greatest
example of the artist in politics.

And without that artist, without his extraordinary literary gift, his
party might not have consolidated in 1860. A very curious party it was.
It had sprung to life as a denial, as a device for halting Douglas.
Lincoln's doctrine of the golden mean, became for once a political
power. Men of the most diverse views on other issues accepted in their
need the axiom: "Stand with anybody so long as he stands right." And
standing right, for that moment in the minds of them all, meant keeping
slavery and the money power from devouring the territories.

The artist of the movement expressed them all in his declaration that
the nation needed the Territories to give home and opportunity to free
white people. Even the Abolitionists, who hitherto had refused to make
common cause with any other faction, entered the negative coalition
of the new party. So did Whigs, and anti-slavery Democrats, as well as
other factions then obscure which we should now label Socialists and
Labormen.

However, this coalition, which in origin was purely negative, revealed,
the moment it coalesced, two positive features. To the man of the near
horizon in 1860 neither of these features seemed of first importance. To
the man outside that horizon, seeing them in perspective as related
to the sum total of American life, they had a significance he did not
entirely appreciate.

The first of these was the temper of the Abolitionists. Lincoln ignored
it. He was content with his ringing assertion of the golden mean. But
there spoke the man of letters rather than the statesman. Of temper
in politics as an abstract idea, he had been keenly conscious from the
first; but his lack of familiarity with political organizations kept him
from assigning full value to the temper of any one factor as affecting
the joint temper of the whole group. It was appointed for him to learn
this in a supremely hard way and to apply the lesson with wonderful