ended to the people
of America and must not be commended to us by the absence of defects as
a ruler or as a man, but by the qualities to which his defects
belonged. An acute literary man wrote of Lincoln, when he had been
three years in office, these remarkable words: "You can't help feeling
an interest in him, a sympathy and a kind of pity; feeling, too, that
he has some qualities of great value, yet fearing that his weak points
may wreck him or may wreck something. His life seems a series of wise,
sound conclusions, slowly reached, oddly worked out, on great questions
with constant failures in administration of detail and dealings with
individuals." It was evidently a clever man who wrote this; he would
have been a wise man if he had known that the praise he was bestowing
on Lincoln was immeasurably greater than the blame.

So the natural prejudice of those who welcomed Lincoln as a prophet in
the Cooper Institute but found his candidature for the Presidency
ridiculous, was not wholly without justification. His partisans,
however--also not unjustly--used his humble origin for all it was
worth. The Republicans of Illinois were assembled at Decatur in
preparation for the Chicago Convention, when, amid tumultuous cheers,
there marched in old John Hanks and another pioneer bearing on their
shoulders two long fence rails labelled: "Two rails from a lot made by
Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks in the Sangamon Bottom in the year
1830." "Gentlemen," said Lincoln, in response to loud calls, "I
suppose you want to know something about those things. Well, the truth
is, John Hanks and I did make rails in the Sangamon Bottom. I don't
know whether we made those rails or not; fact is, I don't think they
are a credit to the makers. But I do know this: I made rails then, and
I think I could make better ones than these now." It is unnecessary to
tell of the part those rails were to play in the coming campaign. It
is a contemptible trait in books like that able novel "Democracy," that
they treat the sentiment which attached to the "Rail-splitter" as
anything but honourable.

The Republican Convention met at Chicago in circumstances of far less
dignity than the Democratic Convention at Charleston. Processions and
brass bands, rough fellows collected by Lincoln's managers, rowdies
imported from New York by Seward's, filled the streets with noise; and
the saloon keepers did good business. Yet the actual Convention
consisted of