ndness; and if there are any
defects in its restoration to-day, they are chiefly due to the baleful
spirit of injustice and hatred which the Republicans took over from the
Abolitionists.

His superiority to his political associates in constructive
statesmanship is measured by his superiority in personal character.
There are many men who are able to forgive the enemies of their country,
but there are few who can forgive their personal enemies. I need not
rehearse the well-known instances of Lincoln's magnanimity. He not only
cherished no resentment against men who had intentionally and even
maliciously injured him, but he seems at times to have gone out of his
way to do them a service. This is, perhaps, his greatest distinction.
Lincoln's magnanimity is the final proof of the completeness of his
self-discipline. The quality of being magnanimous is both the consummate
virtue and the one which is least natural. It was certainly far from
being natural among Lincoln's own people. Americans of his time were
generally of the opinion that it was dishonorable to overlook a
personal injury. They considered it weak and unmanly not to quarrel
with another man a little harder than he quarreled with you. The pioneer
was good-natured and kindly; but he was aggressive, quick-tempered,
unreasonable, and utterly devoid of personal discipline. A slight or an
insult to his personality became in his eyes a moral wrong which must be
cherished and avenged, and which relieved him of any obligation to be
just or kind to his enemy. Many conspicuous illustrations of this
quarrelsome spirit are to be found in the political life of the Middle
Period, which, indeed, cannot be understood without constantly falling
back upon the influence of lively personal resentments. Every prominent
politician cordially disliked or hated a certain number of his political
adversaries and associates; and his public actions were often dictated
by a purpose either to injure these men or to get ahead of them. After
the retirement of Jackson these enmities and resentments came to have a
smaller influence; but a man's right and duty to quarrel with anybody
who, in his opinion, had done him an injury was unchallenged, and was
generally considered to be the necessary accompaniment of American
democratic virility.

As I have intimated above, Andrew Jackson was the most conspicuous
example of this quarrelsome spirit, and for this reason he is wholly
inferior to Lincoln as a