things in regard to which I am not quite satisfied with you. I believe you to be a brave and skillful soldier, which of course I like. I also believe you do not mix politics with your profession, in which you are right. You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable if not indispensable quality. You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm; but I think that during General Burnside's command of the army you have taken counsel of your ambition and thwarted him as much as you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country, and to a most meritorious and honorable brother officer. I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the government needed a dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship. The government will support you to the utmost of its ability, which is neither more nor less than it has done and will do for all commanders. I much fear that the spirit which you have aided to infuse into the army, of criticising their commander and withholding confidence from him, will now turn upon you. I shall assist you as far as I can to put it down. Neither you nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good out of an army while such a spirit prevails in it; and now beware of rashness. Beware of rashness, and give us victories. Yours very truly,

"A. LINCOLN."

We are told of the effect on Hooker in these words: "He finished reading it, almost with tears in his eyes; and as he folded it and put it back in the breast

of his coat, he said, 'That is just such a letter as a fathermight write to a son. It is a beautiful letter, and although I think he was harder on me than I deserved, I will say that I love the man who wrote it.'"

What was it about his speech that gave it such persuasive power and such political permanence? This concrete man was always thinking about concrete things, as to their concrete properties, and as to concrete persons with their concrete rights. He did not deal with metaphysical abstractions nor with the beauties of transcendentalism. He had lived the varied life of a common humanity, from its lowest depths to its loftiest heights. He knew human poverty and privation, human suffering and service, and when his country called, as Cincinnatus left the plough, so he left the law office to which he had been jealously wedded for some years, and espoused humanity's cause for liberty, entire liberty, eternal liberty, the liberty of all men everywhere.

His oratory was not the oratory of expediency, or opportunism; it was the oratory of the eternal reason and right of things. What he said more than a halfcentury ago was entirely and eternally reasonable and right when he said it, and therefore it is entirely and eternally reasonable and right to-day.

He was the universal representative man-humanity's man, unbounded by time or territory, service or station.

Nature has endowed many orators with some wonderful prepossession, such as an attractive physique, a rich voice, or exceptional dramatic power. He had none of these. He was awkward, ungainly, and had a squeaky, falsetto voice. These disadvantages, however, were more than compensated by the humanities

of his head and heart, put in such plain premises, link on link, in such simple, sincere speech that it was like one human heart speaking to a multitude of human hearts in their own language and life.

When we remember how much of controversy in this old world of ours arises out of uncertain, indefinite, double-meaning words, not unfrequently resulting in bitterness and jealousy in our community life, when we remember how much of litigation, from the lowest to the highest courts of the land, arises out of uncertain, inappropriate, ambiguous words and phrases in our constitutions, our statutes, our contracts, the importance of the Lincoln model for written or spoken speech should be most obvious to all of us.

No other man of his own time has demonstrated himself to be such an accurate and reliable interpreter of human nature and human needs as this Man of Illinois.

CHAPTER XIII

LINCOLN ON GOVERNMENT

LINCOLN thought in the terms of democracy; spoke its speech; lived its life; and died triumphant in its defense.

Lincoln was his own pedagogue and pupil in government. He not only studied the trunk and the limbs, but the root and all its branches. His like has not yet been recorded in biography for thoroughness and efficiency in research and study of foundation facts and first principles.

I remember a sentence in one of my old text-books which reads:

"I know a lot of things, but nothing thoroughly; I remember a mass of things but nothing distinctly." How this sentence applies to many of us!

What Lincoln knew he knew "thoroughly." What he remembered, he remembered "distinctly," and he knew and remembered vitally enough so that he could use and did use that knowledge in a practical

way.

The Bible gave him the ethical side of government, the Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States, Constitution of the State of Indiana, the Ordinance of 1787, as contained in Turnham's now famous volume of Revised Statutes of Indiana, gave him the political side of government.

Doubtless, also he learned much from some history of the United States which early came into his pos

session, and also Weems's "Life of Washington," together with other biographies and histories.

His intelligent and enthusiastic interest in the subject of government cropped out at a very early age, considering his handicaps. Several of his reliable biographers say that when he was but seventeen years of age he wrote a composition on the "American Government," giving particular attention to "the necessity of preserving the Constitution and perpetuating the Union."

It is almost prophetic, weirdly so, that this boy at seventeen should be writing an essay on "perpetuating the Union," when thirty-five years later he was to be the great central figure in the conduct of the Civil War for the purpose of "perpetuating the Union."

Lincoln's life, as boy and youth, is a splendid illustration of the old doctrine of evolution announced in Holy Writ, "first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear."

His studies and views continued their development until we have a masterpiece in the address he delivered before the Lyceum of Springfield in January, 1837.

It reads, as many of Lincoln's addresses read, as if they were made not for then, but for now. At that time he was twenty-eight years of age. His English style was not quite as simple, or as smooth as it was in later years, but it had all the Lincoln essentials in it, his simple statement of a given situation, his demonstration of its being wrong or right, and his suggestion and demonstration of the remedy. His clear declaration against mobs and riots and other lawlessness are matters of intense interest to the American public to-day.

The "Mob" of 1837 seems quite the same as the