s been pronounced to have been a Southerner in his inherited character.
Whether he was so typical or not, it is the central fact of this
biography that no man ever pondered more deeply in his own way, or
answered more firmly the question whether there was indeed an American
nationality worth preserving.

CHAPTER III

LINCOLN'S EARLY CAREER

1. _Life at New Salem_.

From this talk of large political movements we have to recall ourselves
to a young labouring man with hardly any schooling, naturally and
incurably uncouth, but with a curious, quite modest, impulse to assert
a kindly ascendency over the companions whom chance threw in his way,
and with something of the gift, which odd, shy people often possess,
for using their very oddity as a weapon in their struggles. In the
conditions of real equality which still prevailed in a newly settled
country it is not wonderful that he made his way into political life
when he was twenty-five, but it was not till twenty years later that he
played an important part in events of enduring significance.

Thus the many years of public activity with which we are concerned in
this and the following chapter belong rather to his apprenticeship than
to his life's work; and this apprenticeship at first sight contrasts
more strongly with his fame afterwards than does his boyhood of poverty
and comparatively romantic hardship. For many poor boys have lived to
make a great mark on history, but as a rule they have entered early on
a life either of learning or of adventure or of large business. But
the affairs in which Lincoln early became immersed have an air of
pettiness, and from the point of view of most educated men and women in
the Eastern States or in Europe, many of the associates and competitors
of his early manhood, to whom he had to look up as his superiors in
knowledge, would certainly have seemed crude people with a narrow
horizon. Indeed, till he was called upon to take supreme control of
very great matters, Lincoln must have had singularly little intercourse
either with men versed in great affairs or with men of approved
intellectual distinction. But a mind too original to be subdued to its
surroundings found much that was stimulating in this time when Illinois
was beginning rapidly to fill up. There were plenty of men with shrewd
wits and robust character to be met with, and the mental atmosphere
which surrounded him was one of keen interest in life. Lincoln
even