, or Hector dying before holy Troy.

Again, it is characteristic that while the modern English know nothing
about Lee they do know something about Lincoln; and nearly all that they
know is wrong. They know nothing of his Southern connections, nothing of
his considerable Southern sympathy, nothing of the meaning of his
moderation in face of the problem of slavery, now lightly treated as
self-evident. Above all, they know nothing about the respect in which
Lincoln was quite un-English, was indeed the very reverse of English;
and can be understood better if we think of him as a Frenchman, since it
seems so hard for some of us to believe that he was an American. I mean
his lust for logic for its own sake, and the way he kept mathematical
truths in his mind like the fixed stars. He was so far from being a
merely practical man, impatient of academic abstractions, that he
reviewed and revelled in academic abstractions, even while he could not
apply them to practical life. He loved to repeat that slavery was
intolerable while he tolerated it, and to prove that something ought to
be done while it was impossible to do it. This was probably very
bewildering to his brother-politicians; for politicians always whitewash
what they do not destroy. But for all that this inconsistent consistency
beat the politicians at their own game, and this abstracted logic proved
the most practical of all. For when the chance did come to do something,
there was no doubt about the thing to be done. The thunderbolt fell
from the clear heights of heaven; it had not been tossed about and lost
like a common missile in the market-place. The matter is worth
mentioning, because it has a moral for a much larger modern question. A
wise man's attitude towards industrial capitalism will be very like
Lincoln's attitude towards slavery. That is, he will manage to endure
capitalism; but he will not endure a defence of capitalism. He will
recognise the value, not only of knowing what he is doing, but of
knowing what he would like to do. He will recognise the importance of
having a thing clearly labelled in his own mind as bad, long before the
opportunity comes to abolish it. He may recognise the risk of even worse
things in immediate abolition, as Lincoln did in abolitionism. He will
not call all business men brutes, any more than Lincoln would call all
planters demons; because he knows they are not. He will regard many
alternatives to capitalism as crude and inhuman