all of its power over American thought. Brief, direct, clear, its simplicity cannot be overcome by argument.

LINCOLN'S SYMPATHY1

IDA M. TARBELL (1857- )

Of all the incidents told of Lincoln's hospital visits, there is nothing more characteristic, better worth preservation, than the one following, preserved by Dr. Jerome Walker of Brooklyn :

"Just one week before his assassination, President Lincoln visited the Army of the Potomac, at City Point, Virginia, and carefully examined the hospital arrangements of the Ninth, Sixth, Fifth, Second, and Sixteenth Corps hospitals and of the Engineer Corps, there stationed. At that time I was an agent of the United States Sanitary Commission attached to the Ninth Corps Hospital. Though a boy of nineteen years, to me was assigned the duty of escorting the President through our department of the hospital system. The reader can imagine the pride with which I fulfilled the duty, and as we went from tent to tent I could not but note his gentleness, his friendly greetings to the sick and wounded, his quiet humor as he drew comparisons between himself and the very tall and very short men with whom he came in contact, and his genuine interest in the welfare of the soldiers.

"Finally, after visiting the wards occupied by our invalid and convalescing soldiers, we came to three wards occupied by sick and wounded Southern prisoners.

1 From "Life of Abraham Lincoln." Copyright, 1900, by The Macmillan Company, New York. Used by permission of the publishers.

With a feeling of patriotic duty, I said: 'Mr. President, you won't want to go in there; they are only rebels.' I will never forget how he stopped and gently laid his large hand upon my shoulder and quietly answered, 'You mean Confederates.' And I have meant Con

federates ever since.

"There was nothing left for me to do after the President's remark but to go with him through these three wards; and I could not see but that he was just as kind, his handshakings just as hearty, his interest just as real for the welfare of the men, as when he was among our own soldiers.

"As we returned to headquarters, the President urged upon me the importance of caring for them as faithfully as I should for our own sick and wounded. When I visited next day these three wards, the Southern officers and soldiers were full of praise for ‘Abe' Lincoln, as they called him, and when a week afterwards the news came of the assassination, there was no truer sorrow nor greater indignation anywhere than was shown by these same Confederates."

LINCOLN A TYPICAL AMERICAN1

PHILLIPS BROOKS (1835-1893)

It is not necessary for me even to sketch the biography of Mr. Lincoln. He was born in Kentucky, fifty-six years ago, when Kentucky was a pioneer state. He lived, as boy and man, the hard and needy life of a back

1 From "The Life and Death of Abraham Lincoln," a sermon preached April 23, 1865. Printed in pamphlet form by Henry B. Ashmead, Philadelphia, 1865, at the request of members of the congregation.

woodsman, a farmer, a river boatman, and finally, by his own efforts at self-education, of an active, respected, influential citizen, in the half-organized and manifold interests of a new and energetic community. From his boyhood up he lived in direct and vigorous contact with men and things, not as in older states and easier conditions with words and theories; and both his moral convictions and intellectual opinions gathered from that contact a supreme degree of that character by which men knew him that character which is the most distinctive possession of the best American nature that almost indescribable quality which we call in general clearness or truth, and which appears in the physical structure as health, in the moral constitution as honesty, in the mental structure as sagacity, and in the region of active life as practicalness. This one character, with many sides, all shaped by the same essential force and testifying to the same inner influences, was what was powerful in him and decreed for him the life he was to live and the death he was to die. We must take no smaller view than this of what he was.

It is the great boon of such characters as Mr. Lincoln's, that they reunite what God has joined together and man has put asunder. In him was vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the goodness of real greatness. The twain were one flesh. Not one of all the multitudes who stood and looked up to him for direction with such a loving and implicit trust can tell you today whether the wise judgments that he gave came most from a strong head or a sound heart. If you ask them, they are puzzled. There are men as good as he, but they do bad things. There are men as intelligent as he, but they do foolish things. In him goodness and intelligence combined and

made their best result of wisdom. For perfect truth consists not merely in the right constituents of character, but in their right and intimate conjunction. This union of the mental and moral into a life of admirable simplicity is what we most admire in children; but in them it is unsettled and unpractical. But when it is preserved into a manhood, deepened into reliability and maturity, it is that glorified childlikeness, that high and reverend simplicity, which shames and baffles the most accomplished astuteness, and is chosen by God to fill His purposes when He needs a ruler for His people, of faithful and true heart, such as he had, who was our President.

Another evident quality of such a character as this, will be its freshness or newness, so to speak. Its freshness or readiness-call it what you will - its ability to take up new duties and do them in a new way will result of necessity from its truth and clearness. The simple natures and forces will always be the most pliant ones. Water bends and shapes itself to any channel. Air folds and adapts itself to each new figure. They are the simplest and the most infinitely active things in nature. So this nature, in very virtue of its simplicity, must be also free, always fitting itself to each new need. It will always start from the most fundamental and eternal conditions, and work in the straightest, even although they be the newest ways, to the present prescribed purpose. In one word, it must be broad and independent and radical. So that freedom and radicalness in the character of Abraham Lincoln were not separate qualities, but the necessary results of his simplicity and childlikeness and truth.

Here then we have some conception of the man. Out of this character came the life which we admire and the

death which we lament today. He was called in that character to that life and death. It was just the nature, as you see, which a new nation such as ours ought to produce. All the conditions of his birth, his youth, his manhood, which made him what he was, were not irregular and exceptional, but were the normal conditions of a new and simple country. His pioneer home in Indiana was a type of the pioneer land in which he lived. If ever there was a man who was a part of the time and country he lived in, this was he. The same simple respect for labor won in the school of work and incorporated into blood and muscle; the same unassuming loyalty to the simple virtues of temperance and industry and integrity; the same sagacious judgment which had learned to be quick-eyed and quick-brained in the constant presence of emergency; the same direct and clear thought about things, social, political, and religious, that was in him supremely, was in the people he was sent to rule.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN1

ROBERT G. INGERSOLL (1833-1899)

Lincoln was not a type. He stands alone no ancestors, no fellows, and no successors.

He had the advantage of living in a new country, of social equality, of personal freedom, of seeing in the horizon of his future the perpetual star of hope.

The oration on Lincoln, of which this selection forms a part, was one of the most famous of Ingersoll's lectures, and was perhaps oftener called for than any other.

From Works of Robert G. Ingersoll (Dresden Edition). right, 1901, 1915, by The Dresden Publishing Company, New York. Used by permission of the publishers.

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