Abraham Lincoln
Page: 3

reader of newspapers. The peddlers of rumor in the North were the
most effective allies of the rebellion. A nation can be liable to no
more insidious treachery than that of the telegraph, sending hourly
its electric thrill of panic along the remotest nerves of the
community, till the excited imagination makes every real danger
loom heightened with its unreal double.

And even if we look only at more palpable difficulties, the problem
to be solved by our civil war was so vast, both in its immediate
relations and its future consequences; the conditions of its solution
were so intricate and so greatly dependent on incalculable and
uncontrollable contingencies; so many of the data, whether for hope
or fear, were, from their novelty, incapable of arrangement under
any of the categories of historical precedent, that there were
moments of crisis when the firmest believer in the strength and
sufficiency of the democratic theory of government might well hold
his breath in vague apprehension of disaster. Our teachers of
political philosophy, solemnly arguing from the precedent of some
petty Grecian, Italian, or Flemish city, whose long periods of
aristocracy were broken now and then by awkward parentheses of
mob, had always taught us that democracies were incapable of the
sentiment of loyalty, of concentrated and prolonged effort, of far-
reaching conceptions; were absorbed in material interests; impatient
of regular, and much more of exceptional restraint; had no natural
nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but centrifugal; were always
on the verge of civil war, and slunk at last into the natural
almshouse of bankrupt popular government, a military despotism.
Here was indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew
democracy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but merely
from books, and America only by the report of some fellow-Briton,
who, having eaten a bad dinner or lost a carpet-bag here, had
written to *The Times* demanding redress, and drawing a
mournful inference of democratic instability. Nor were men
wanting among ourselves who had so steeped their brains in
London literature as to mistake Cockneyism for European culture,