type of democratic manhood. Jackson had many
admirable qualities, and on the whole he served his country well. He
also was a "Man of the People" who understood and represented the mass
of his fellow-countrymen, and who played the part, according to his
lights, of a courageous and independent political leader. He also loved
and defended the Union. But with all his excellence he should never be
held up as a model to American youth. The world was divided into his
personal friends and followers and his personal enemies, and he was as
eager to do the latter an injury as he was to do the former a service.
His quarrels were not petty, because Jackson was, on the whole, a big
rather than a little man, but they were fierce and they were for the
most part irreconcilable. They bulk so large in his life that they
cannot be overlooked. They stamp him a type of the vindictive man
without personal discipline, just as Lincoln's behavior towards Stanton,
Chase, and others stamps him a type of the man who has achieved
magnanimity. He is the kind of national hero the admiring imitation of
whom can do nothing but good.

Lincoln had abandoned the illusion of his own peculiar personal
importance. He had become profoundly and sincerely humble, and his
humility was as far as possible from being either a conventional pose or
a matter of nervous self-distrust. It did not impair the firmness of his
will. It did not betray him into shirking responsibilities. Although
only a country lawyer without executive experience, he did not flinch
from assuming the leadership of a great nation in one of the gravest
crises of its national history, from becoming commander-in-chief of an
army of a million men, and from spending $3,000,000,000 in the
prosecution of a war. His humility, that is, was precisely an example of
moral vitality and insight rather than of moral awkwardness and
enfeeblement. It was the fruit of reflection on his own personal
experience--the supreme instance of his ability to attain moral truth
both in discipline and in idea; and in its aspect of a moral truth it
obtained a more explicit expression than did some other of his finer
personal attributes. His practice of cherishing and repeating the
plaintive little verses which inquire monotonously whether the spirit of
mortal has any right to be proud indicates the depth and the highly
conscious character of this fundamental moral conviction. He is not only
humble himself, but he feels and d