pplication to be appointed Commissioner of the General Land Office;
defeated for the Senate when he had forty-five votes to begin with by
a man who had only five votes to begin with; defeated again after
his joint debates with Douglas; defeated in the nomination for
Vice-President, when a favorable nod from half a dozen politicians would
have brought him success.

Failures? Not so. Every seeming defeat was a slow success. His was
the growth of the oak, and not of Jonah's gourd. He could not become a
master workman until he had served a tedious apprenticeship. It was the
quarter of a century of reading, thinking, speech-making and lawmaking
which fitted him to be the chosen champion of freedom in the great
Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. It was the great moral victory won in
those debates (although the senatorship went to Douglas) added to the
title "Honest Old Abe," won by truth and manhood among his neighbors
during a whole lifetime, that led the people of the United States to
trust him with the duties and powers of President.

And when, at last, after thirty years of endeavor, success had beaten
down defeat, when Lincoln had been nominated, elected and inaugurated,
came the crowning trial of his faith and constancy. When the people, by
free and lawful choice, had placed honor and power in his hands, when
his name could convene Congress, approve laws, cause ships to sail and
armies to move, there suddenly came upon the government and the nation
a 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.

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