Abraham Lincoln
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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 of Europe, echoed and reinforced with every vague
hint and every specious argument of despondency by a powerful
faction at home, was either contemptuously sceptical or actively
hostile. It would be hard to over-estimate the force of this latter
element of disintegration and discouragement among a people
where every citizen at home, and every soldier in the field, is a