fatal paralysis. Honor seemed to dwindle and power to vanish. Was he
then, after all, not to be President? Was patriotism dead? Was the
Constitution only a bit of waste paper? Was the Union gone?

The outlook was indeed grave. There was treason in Congress, treason in
the Supreme Court, treason in the army and navy. Confusion and discord
were everywhere. To use Mr. Lincoln's forcible figure of speech, sinners
were calling the righteous to repentance. Finally the flag, insulted and
fired upon, trailed in surrender at Sumter; and then came the
humiliation of the riot at Baltimore, and the President for a few days
practically a prisoner in the capital of the nation.

[Illustration: PRESIDENT LINCOLN AND TAD]

But his apprenticeship had been served, and there was to be no more
failure. With faith and justice and generosity he conducted for four
long years a war whose frontiers stretched from the Potomac to the Rio
Grande; whose soldiers numbered a million men on each side. The labor,
the thought, the responsibility, the strain of mind and anguish of soul
that he gave to his great task, who can measure? "Here was place for no
holiday magistrate, no fair-weather sailor," as Emerson justly said of
him. "The new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado. In four
years--four years of battle days--his endurance, his fertility of
resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found wanting."
"By his courage, his justice, his even temper, ... his humanity, he stood
a heroic figure in a heroic epoch."

[Illustration: THE LINCOLN MONUMENT AT SPRINGFIELD]

What but a lifetime's schooling in disappointment; what but the
pioneer's self-reliance and freedom from prejudice; what but the clear
mind quick to see natural right and unswerving in its purpose to follow
it; what but the steady self-control, the unwarped sympathy, the
unbounded charity of this man with spirit so humble and soul so great,
could have carried him through the labors he wrought to the victory he
attained?

With truth it could be written, "His heart was as great as the world,
but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong." So, "with
malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as
God gave him to see the right," he lived and died. We, who have never
seen him, yet feel daily the influence of his kindly life, and cherish
among our most precious possessions the heritage of his example.

[Illustration: STATUE OF ABRAHAM