inciple of brotherhood. He was the foremost to deny liberty to the
South, and he had his sensible doubts about the equality between the
negro and the white man; but he actually treated everybody--the Southern
rebel, the negro slave, the Northern deserter, the personal enemy--in a
just and kindly spirit. Neither was this kindliness merely an instance
of ordinary American amiability and good nature. It was the result, not
of superficial feeling which could be easily ruffled, but of his
personal, moral, and intellectual discipline. He had made for himself a
second nature, compact of insight and loving-kindness.

It must be remembered, also, that this higher humanity resided in a man
who was the human instrument partly responsible for an awful amount of
slaughter and human anguish. He was not only the commander-in-chief of a
great army which fought a long and bloody war, but he was the statesman
who had insisted that, if necessary, the war should be fought. His
mental attitude was dictated by a mixture of practical common sense with
genuine human insight, and it is just this mixture which makes him so
rare a man and, be it hoped, so prophetic a democrat. He could at one
and the same moment order his countrymen to be killed for seeking to
destroy the American nation and forgive them for their error. His
kindliness and his brotherly feeling did not lead him, after the manner
of Jefferson, to shirk the necessity and duty of national defense.
Neither did it lead him, after the manner of William Lloyd Garrison, to
advocate non-resistance, while at the same time arousing in his
fellow-countrymen a spirit of fratricidal warfare. In the midst of that
hideous civil contest which was provoked, perhaps unnecessarily, by
hatred, irresponsibility, passion, and disloyalty, and which has been
the fruitful cause of national disloyalty down to the present day,
Lincoln did not for a moment cherish a bitter or unjust feeling against
the national enemies. The Southerners, filled as they were with a
passionate democratic devotion to their own interests and liberties,
abused Lincoln until they really came to believe that he was a military
tyrant, yet he never failed to treat them in a fair and forgiving
spirit. When he was assassinated, it was the South, as well as the
American nation, which had lost its best friend, because he alone among
the Republican leaders had the wisdom to see that the divided House
could only be restored by justice and ki