life. No fair opinion can be reached by the analysis of single acts; and after a careful, deliberate, and serious review of Mr. Lincoln's course during the past four years, we do not hesitate to say that there is no statesman in America to whose hands the great authority and power of the Presidency could be more fitly or confidently committed. And in saying this, we do not disregard the fact, that the affairs of the nation during the next four years will demand the highest statesmanship in the men called upon to direct them. The questions which returning peace and the re-establishment of the government will bring up for determination will be no less perplexing than those which have attended the course of the war. To restore the state, to settle the Union upon the firm foundations of order, will be a task requiring the best wisdom. It is vain to attempt to predict the exact form in which these questions will present themselves, but upon their correct solution depends the future welfare of the nation; and they will, we may be sure, be debated with an earnestness of feeling proportioned to their importance. And it is plain that what we have hitherto been but imperfectly as a nation, we are to become thoroughly. America is to become more American. We have passed the period of experiment. We have met, resisted, and overcome the worst perils. Prosperity and adversity have alike instructed us in the worth of our institutions, have alike confirmed our confidence in the genuine principles of democracy, and strengthened our faith in popular government.

We are now entering upon an era in which the political principles which are distinctively American, as having been here, for the first time in the history of the world, deliberately established as the foundation of a great, free political community, are to have fuller scope and new development. The principles themselves are as old as the moral nature of man; for they are simply the expression of the natural rights of man in society. The political equality of men, their right to equal justice and freedom, their right to self-government, their right to every means of self-development consistent with the general welfare, these are the essence of the American system of democracy. To give to these principles their broadest applications, to embody these rights in practical measures, to

harmonize special acts of administration with the general system, is the duty of those intrusted with the power of the state. The men who are most fully possessed by the spirit of our system, the men who have most confidence in it, are those to whose hands the administration of the general government may most safely be committed; and there has never been a statesman in America more thoroughly in sympathy with the best interests of the American people, or more completely imbued with reverence for those ideas of justice, freedom, and humanity which inspire American institutions, than Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, one great source of the mis-esteem in which he is held by many persons in the community not opposed to him as partisans, and of the attacks upon him by the misnamed Democratic party of the present day, arises from the fact that there is a large class of Americans by birth or adoption, including the larger part of the spurious Democratic party, who are not Americans in principle. They have inherited prepossessions from the past; they belong to the old world of class-privilege, of inequality, of unjust political distinctions. They breathe with difficulty the free air of the new world. Their souls are not open to the inspiring and ennobling doctrines on which the future is to be builded fair. The revilings which have been shouted from Richmond, the cries of "Ape," "Monster," "Imbecile," - revilings repeated by the low ministers of faction at the North,-are but the ribaldry in which the offscourings of an aristocracy based upon the denial of human rights display their hatred of those principles of democracy of which Mr. Lincoln is the worthy representative.

By birth, by education, by sympathy, Mr. Lincoln is of the people. His training has been in the popular school. He is an American in the best sense; and it is a circumstance beyond measure fortunate, that a man of this stamp should be at the head of affairs at a juncture so critical as the present, and during a period in which American principles are, as we have said, to receive new developments and wider application.

The prevailing quality of Mr. Lincoln as a statesman is his confidence, as he has himself expressed it, in "government of the people, by the people, for the people." From his first expression as President, this has been his ruling idea. In the

brief address that he delivered at Indianapolis on the day that he left Springfield to go to Washington, - the 11th of February, 1861, he said, in words of the depth of whose meaning even he at that time was but partially conscious, "Of the people, when they rise in mass in behalf of the Union and of the liberties of their country, truly may it be said, 'The gates of hell cannot prevail against them'"; and he concluded his address with the words, "I appeal to you again to constantly bear in mind that with you, and not with politicians, not with Presidents, not with office-seekers, but with you, rests the question, Shall the Union, and shall the liberties of this country, be preserved to the latest generation?" Again and again, in the short speeches made by him during his journey to Washington, he dwelt on this idea. "It is with you, the people, to advance the great cause of Union and the Constitution." "I am sure

I bring a heart true to the work. For the ability to perform it, I must trust in that Supreme Being who has never forsaken this favored land, through the instrumentality of this great and intelligent people." The same idea runs through the Inaugural Address, reappearing in various forms as it presents itself in connection with the different topics treated in that memorable discourse. "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it." "The chief magistrate derives all his authority from the people." "Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?"

There is indeed nothing particularly new in the manner of these statements, and nothing original in the idea of the supremacy of the people. The new and remarkable thing in them is, that whereas hitherto these ideas have been held with more or less sincerity and confidence by our statesmen, they are the groundwork of Mr. Lincoln's political convictions; they are the essence of his political creed. The importance to the country of having a man in the Presidential chair during the Rebellion who was thoroughly and practically in earnest in holding these doctrines, is hardly to be over-estimated; for the events of this period have required such an appeal to be made by the government to the people as was never before demanded, and the course of the government on some of the

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most important questions of policy has displayed an absolute confidence in the satisfactory answer that the people would make to their appeal. The nation was worthy of this confidence; and the past four years have done more than any similar period in our history to develop its trust in itself, and to convert not merely our politicians, but the whole people, from theoretical democratic republicans into practical believers in the rights of man, and in the power and virtue of an intelligent democracy.

No man can have such democratic instincts and principles as Mr. Lincoln has manifested, without being possessed with a strong devotion to liberty, and to the justice which is a component part of the idea of freedom. For a generation, at least, the large idea of liberty as a principle of conservatism and development has been greatly lost sight of in the narrower views which have grown out of the conflict in regard to slavery. Freedom has been opposed to slavery as if it were its contrary, as if it were little more than a merely destructive power. Our Northern statesmen have for the most part given themselves up to the argument against slavery, rather than to the argument for liberty. Had their devotion to liberty been equal to their zeal or their professions against slavery, the South could never have won those civil and political victories which encouraged her at length to try the force of arms.

Mr. Lincoln has throughout his public career been a consistent and steadfast opponent of slavery, not merely on the ground of the evil intrinsic to the institution, but mainly on the ground of its incompatibility with the free institutions of the country. The famous opening sentences of his speech at Springfield, Ill., on the 17th of June, 1858, contain the gist of his doctrine on the subject. "A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot permanently endure half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, I do not expect the house to fall, — but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other." The speech that contained these words was delivered, it should be remembered, some time before Mr. Seward, by his speech at Rochester, made the doctrine of the "irrepressible conflict" familiar to the people of the country.

In a speech at Independence Hall on the 21st of February, 1861, on his journey to Washington, Mr. Lincoln said, speaking of the Colonies during the Revolution: "I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the mother land, but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men." The Declaration of Independence, thus interpreted, is the inspiration of Mr. Lincoln's political faith. It is impossible for him to dissociate from his confidence in the people as the souree of all authority, and as competent to rule themselves, his equal confidence that "nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded and imbruted by its fellows." In declaring the truths with which the Declaration of Independence opens to be self-evident, the signers of that charter but gave expression, to use Mr. Lincoln's own words, to "their lofty and wise and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to his creatures." And it is his strong sense of the fact that it is by these principles that the republic lives, and that by its existence it keeps them alive for the benefit of the world, which has directed his policy, and marked his utterances, in regard to the Rebellion whose object was "to overthrow this government, which was built on the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of human slavery."

In his letter to the workingmen of London, on the 2d of February, 1863, Mr. Lincoln said: "The resources, advantages, and powers of the American people are very great; and they have consequently succeeded to equally great responsibilities. It seems to have devolved on them to test whether a government established on the principles of human freedom can be maintained against an effort to build one upon the exclusive foundation of human bondage." And in an address made to an Ohio regiment on its return home through Washington at the expiration of its term of service, on the 18th of