Great captains, with their guns and drums, But at last silence comes; These all are gone, and standing like a tower, The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, SAYINGS OF LINCOLN1 L. LAMPREY Abraham Lincoln's homely way of discussing state affairs in the common phrases of a pioneer people was not only characteristic of him, but peculiarly American. Never before had a statesman appeared who, confronted with tremendous problems, talked of them in language that no one could fail to understand. His advisers might criticize, but they never made him alter a sentence that fitted his meaning. To such a critic he once replied: "The word says exactly what I want to say. There will never be a time in this country when the people will not know what 'sugar-coated' means." When he had framed a message of international importance, to be sent to England, he said in submitting it to a 1 The most complete embodiment of the American spirit was the great martyred President. This was because he expressed so fully the feelings and ideas of the common man and spoke his language. Anecdotes revealing these traits are almost innumerable. The selection given here, which might be extended indefinitely, is a compilation of a number of such anecdotes from a variety of sources. Cabinet member for approval: "I know that the Prime Minister will understand this paragraph, but will James who opens the carriage door understand it? That is what I want to make sure of." Lincoln had a particular objection to long-winded speeches and wordy reports. He once made the comment, on seeing a very bulky report presented by a committee: 'When I send a man to buy a horse för me, I expect him to tell me the points of the animal not to count the 66 hairs in his tail!" The mud in Washington streets suggested to him this rule of action in a perplexing crisis: "Put your feet down in the right place, and then stand firm!" He had no illusions about the men with whom he worked. He took them as they were. "Every horse," he said, "has some faults, and so has every man.' Urged to change a man in office for one who might do better, he gave the country the proverb: "Don't swap horses while crossing a stream." No man was quicker at repartee than Lincoln, and none more cautious in speech and action. His instinct was invariably for constructive statesmanship-to make use of a man rather than to offend him. He said of himself: "I always rooted up a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.' His whimsical answer to Stanton, when urged to severe measures, was: "I do not believe that shooting a man does him any good." There are many stories of the excuses he found for saving the lives of soldiers condemned to death for some infraction of discipline. He once said that if he could contrive to save a man's life it rested him after a hard day. His time and strength were seldom wasted in useless contest. "If a man will not turn out for me," he said, "I turn out for him, and save a collision.' A wrathful governor called one day at the White House to protest against a levy of troops, but went away smiling serenely. "You must have given him what he wanted," was the comment made to Lincoln. The President smiled. "Not exactly. I knew a farmer once, in Illinois, who had a big stump in the middle of his best field. It was too large to move away, too hard to be split, and too wet to burn. When he was asked how he managed about that stump, the farmer explained that he just plowed around it. That was what I did with the Governor I plowed around him!" Lincoln sometimes had his hands full in averting the consequences of other people's blunders. When Secretary Chase expressed regret one night at not having written a certain letter, the President said reassuringly: “Never regret the letters you do not write it is the letters you do write that give you trouble." Another official wrote a scathing letter of reproof and handed it over to Lincoln to read. Lincoln read it. "That is a fine letter," he said, nodding approval, "very fine says exactly what ought to be said - just the sort of letter to be put in the files. Now file it away. Don't mail it." Theories never hampered Lincoln when he had a practical problem to deal with. Of one such difficulty he said: "When you have an elephant on your hands, and he wants to run away, the best plan is to let him go." Of an argument more plausible than sound he observed: "Yes: I should think that if people like that kind of thing, it is just the kind of thing they would like." No pretense of intellectual, moral, or social superiority ever moved Lincoln. When one of his visitors declared that the Lord was on the side of the Union, Lincoln answered: "I am not at all concerned about that. I know that He is always on the side of the right. It is my constant anxiety and prayer that we shall be on the Lord's side." One of his sayings which has passed into a proverb had a curious origin. He dreamed one night that he heard some one say of a crowd that they were commonlooking men, and that in his dream he replied: "The Lord must love common people: He made so many of them." A German baron who wished to join the Union army presented a long list of his titled and distinguished ancestors. Lincoln met him with the assurance: "That makes no difference at all. You will be treated with entire fairness!" 66 In a speech made to the 166th Ohio Regiment, August 22, 1864, after reviewing it at the White House, he said: "I happen temporarily to occupy this White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has. It is in order that each one of you may have, through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise, and intelligence, that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations, it is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright." The foundation of Lincoln's policy was his abiding faith in the common sense of the people. One of his sayings was: "The people are always much nearer the truth than politicians think." Another shrewd epigram has become familiar: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time; but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." His belief in equal rights was defined in the statement used in one of his early speeches: "I hold that if the Almighty had ever made a set of men who should do all of the eating and none of the work, He would have made them with mouths only and no hands." Chary of rhetoric when there was no need of it, Lincoln could, as all the world knows, give terse and powerful expression to great thoughts. As he said in one of his speeches: "You have seen two men about to fight. One brags of what he means to do. The other fellow says not a word. He is saving his wind for the fight, and he will win or die a-trying!" Every uncompromising statement that he made in the days of the great conflict aroused the fears of politic friends, who urged that he would imperil his own future. One such statement was made in a speech before his election. It consists of the famous paragraph: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe that this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect this house to fall. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. But I do expect that it will cease to be divided." His answer to the critics was: "Friends, if it must be that I go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the truth." The essence of representative government is in another saying, relic of this era of battling political systems: "No man is good enough to rule another man without that other man's consent." After half a century, the practical philosophy of Lincoln, hammered out in the school of experience, retains |