Public Address," all significant examples of the brilliant and close-knit arguments of a luminous mind.

The study of Lincoln is necessary both for the politician and the writer. No man better understood the arts of politics, the kind of appeal that reaches legislators and political leaders and,-still more important,-which works its way into the mind of the voter. Lincoln was not always successful with Congress. He could not induce the two houses to grant general compensated emancipation, nor to provide for colonizing the negroes, but he did convince the country that he was honest and sincere, and that he had put up a good and honest argument. He made the people see.

On the other hand, since the object of both the spoken and written word is to convince, Lincoln should be the model and the study of the would-be journalist, lawyer, minister, teacher, and public man; for his works are a storehouse of limpid thoughts, expressed in cogent words, set into logical and powerful sentences and combined into arguments of mighty power. Lincoln's sternest rebukes and his most humorous sallies are alike models of the right way to reach the minds of other people, to make them listen to you, to set them aflame with your own generous enthusiasms.

III. THE MANY-SIDED LINCOLN

Lincoln was able to make the world hear him because he knew the world. Amazing that this backswoodsman, this awkward civilian, this country member of Congress, this ambitious speech-making lawyer, should be as big

and as many sided as the great Intellectuals of the Renaissance. Lincoln is our Michael Angelo.

In the first place he was a man of the woods. He knew the frontier from camp-fire to court-house. He was one of the first group of national statesmen who owed their training and opportunity to the West. That frontier life was hard, coarse, and material, Lincoln began at the very bottom of a low stage of society. Yet from the beginning he showed that desire to know what was going on in the world, which finally filled his memory with the thoughts of the few books and the many men that he had known.

To the end of his life he kept some of the backwoods habits awkward motions, love of a boisterous joke, stories, in which he was a master. He kept also the primitive sense of man-for-man life amid an unbroken country and savage enemies. He never lost that genuine warm interest in men and women, boys and girls, and babies. He felt it as Henry Clay felt it, and Theodore Roosevelt. Reading about Lincoln is reading about mankind, and especially about Americans.

His very personality made friends for him. That tall, angular, ungraceful man, with little knowledge of the refined literary circle which was so powerful in his time, somehow could make friends with all sorts of people. He could appreciate the best that was in his neighbor the poor white, Jack Armstrong, one of the Clary Grove gang at New Salem; and he liked and understood that high-bred gentleman, William H. Seward. He was not averse to a wrestling match with the one and a paper and ink contest with the other-and was victorious in both.

Fortunate the statesman who gets such affectionate nicknames as "Old Abe," "Honest Old Abe," and "Father Abraham"! Even Southern men who understood the times best had a personal liking for Lincoln and sorrowfully understood that when he was taken away in 1865, the South lost more than the North, because they more needed an understanding friend.

IV. LINCOLN THE LAWYER

Lincoln was by profession and by temperament a lawyer, for he had the qualities that meant success in law in his time, and would make him a great legal light to-day. Law was a rather simple matter on the frontier a century ago. Every ambitious youngster read Blackstone; every law student drew deeds and did other clerical work in the law office of an older man; everybody set up for himself as soon as he could, and joined in the elbow push for business. The judges were taken out of the working bar and knew little more law than those who pleaded before them.

The truly successful lawyer was, therefore, the man who could carry a jury; that is the man who understood human nature. In this personal hammer-and-tongs kind of law Lincoln was very successful; for he had the humor and the power to put on the kind of oratory that juries liked; and at the same time he had two great advantages over many of his fellow members of the bar. The first was that his mind went right into the heart of his case. He had the rare skill to see what the whole thing is about, what the real issue is, which later made him a great

president. At the same time he had a reputation for personal integrity. There were cases he would not take; there were cases he would not argue. Hence, when he took and argued a case, there was a presumption that he was right; and every client knew that his advocate was certain to give him his due. His great cases were few but honorable. He was a safe and trusted man. So far as we have a record of his legal arguments, they show the same insight, the same ability to seize on the critical issue, that he showed in politics and as president.

In the West most successful lawyers went into politics, and most of the successful politicians were lawyers. This was partly because arguments at the bar were very like speeches on the stump, and also because those new communities needed men who could frame constitutions and statutes. From 1837 to 1849 Abraham Lincoln was in the battle front of the lively political struggles of the time. He was an ardent Whig, a supporter of Henry Clay, and early in life entered into rivalry with Stephen A. Douglas, a Vermont boy who came early to the West and took the Democratic side in politics.

Nobody understood the game of politics better than Abraham Lincoln. He was a master hand in conventions and campaigning. He especially liked to drag an opponent out of his retirement and show his inconsistencies. He was afraid of nobody, was physically able to protect himself in the rough and tumble difficulties of the frontier, and on one occasion even took part in the preparation for a grotesque duel with a fellow politician. He was famed for his skill in interpreting election returns; that is, for a power of generalization based on an in

stinctive knowledge of human nature. He was an excellent campaigner, as was shown particularly in his great debates with Douglas.

V. LINCOLN THE ORATOR

Speaking is one thing, oratory is another. In his earliest formal address, that of 1837, Lincoln shows many of the marks of his wondrous skill as a public speaker. He was influenced by the wordy tradition of his time, but he shows that persistent search for the main question was the foundation stone of his success. In Congress his speeches, as reported by the official stenographer, are below his average; his humor in them is rough and personal. After he retired in 1849, for five years he took little part in public affairs. He was roused by the KansasNebraska bill of 1854, which he justly looked upon as an attempt by Douglas to gain influence as "a Northern man with Southern principles." In his famous "Lost Speech" of 1854, parts of which appear in this volume, he used a fiercer attack than was his custom. As early as 1855, he thought out and put in writing the tremendous truth, hardly perceived by any one else at that time, that the Union could not endure "half slave and half free." In 1856 he stood forward as the champion of freedom against Douglas. In 1858, in one of the most courageous moments of his life, he challenged the mighty Douglas, the quickest, boldest, and unfairest of debaters, to a series of seven joint debates, in which he showed himself the profoundest thinker, the highest orator, and the bravest champion of his time.