Abraham Lincoln | Page 3

Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the net profits
you derive calculated using the method you already use to calculate
your applicable taxes. If you don't derive profits, no royalty is due.
Royalties are payable to "Project Gutenberg
Association/Carnegie-Mellon University" within the 60 days following
each date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare) your annual
(or equivalent periodic) tax return.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU
DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time, scanning
machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty free copyright
licenses, and every other sort of contribution you can think of. Money
should be paid to "Project Gutenberg Association / Carnegie-Mellon
University".
*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN
ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*

This Etext prepared by Tony Adam [email protected]

Abraham Lincoln by James Russell Lowell
THERE have been many painful crises since the impatient vanity of
South Carolina hurried ten prosperous Commonwealths into a crime
whose assured retribution was to leave them either at the mercy of the
nation they had wronged, or of the anarchy they had summoned but
could not control, when no thoughtful American opened his morning
paper without dreading to find that he had no longer a country to love
and honor. Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks
were beginning to be felt, there would still be enough square miles of
earth for elbow-room; but that ineffable sentiment made up of memory
and hope, of instinct and tradition, which swells every man's heart and
shapes his thought, though perhaps never present to his consciousness,
would be gone from it, leaving it common earth and nothing more. Men
might gather rich crops from it, but that ideal harvest of priceless

associations would be reaped no longer; that fine virtue which sent up
messages of courage and security from every sod of it would have
evaporated beyond recall. We should be irrevocably cut off from our
past, and be forced to splice the ragged ends of our lives upon whatever
new conditions chance might leave dangling for us.
We confess that we had our doubts at first whether the patriotism of our
people were not too narrowly provincial to embrace the proportions of
national peril. We felt an only too natural distrust of immense public
meetings and enthusiastic cheers.
That a reaction should follow the holiday enthusiasm with which the
war was entered on, that it should follow soon, and that the slackening
of public spirit should be proportionate to the previous over-tension,
might well be foreseen by all who had studied human nature or history.
Men acting gregariously are always in extremes; as they are one
moment capable of higher courage, so they are liable, the next, to baser
depression, and it is often a matter of chance whether numbers shall
multiply confidence or discouragement. Nor does deception lead more
surely to distrust of men, than self-deception to suspicion of principles.
The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that
which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of
experience. Enthusiasm is good material for the orator, but the
statesman needs something more durable to work in,--must be able to
rely on the deliberate reason and consequent firmness of the people,
without which that presence of mind, no less essential in times of moral
than of material peril, will be wanting at the critical moment. Would
this fervor of the Free States hold out? Was it kindled by a just feeling
of the value of constitutional liberty? Had it body enough to withstand
the inevitable dampening of checks, reverses, delays? Had our
population intelligence enough to comprehend that the choice was
between order and anarchy, between the equilibrium of a government
by law and the tussle of misrule by *pronunciamiento?* Could a war be
maintained without the ordinary stimulus of hatred and plunder, and
with the impersonal loyalty of principle? These were serious questions,
and with no precedent to aid in answering them.
At the beginning of the war there was, indeed, occasion for the most
anxious apprehension. A President known to be infected with the
political heresies, and suspected of sympathy with the treason, of the

Southern conspirators, had just surrendered the reins, we will not say of
power, but of chaos, to a successor known only as the representative of
a party whose leaders, with long training in opposition, had none in the
conduct of affairs; an empty treasury was called on to supply resources
beyond precedent in the history of finance; the trees were yet growing
and the iron unmined with which a navy was to be built and armored;
officers without discipline were to make a mob into an army; and,
above all, the public opinion