Abraham Lincoln
Page: 4

and contempt of their country for cosmopolitan breadth of view,
and who, owing all they had an all they were to democracy, thought
it had an air of high-breeding to join in the shallow epicedium that
our bubble had burst.

But beside any disheartening influences which might affect the timid
or the despondent, there were reasons enough of settled gravity
against any over-confidence of hope. A war--which, whether we
consider the expanse of the territory at stake, the hosts brought into
the field, or the reach of the principles involved, may fairly be
reckoned the most momentous of modern times--was to be waged
by a people divided at home, unnerved by fifty years of peace,
under a chief magistrate without experience and without reputation,
whose every measure was sure to be cunningly hampered by a
jealous and unscrupulous minority, and who, while dealing with
unheard-of complications at home, must soothe a hostile neutrality
abroad, waiting only a pretext to become war. All this was to be
done without warning and without preparation, while at the same
time a social revolution was to be accomplished in the political
condition of four millions of people, by softening the prejudices,
allaying the fears, and gradually obtaining the cooperation, of their
unwilling liberators. Surely, if ever there were an occasion when
the heightened imagination of the historian might see Destiny visibly
intervening in human affairs, here was a knot worthy of her shears.
Never, perhaps, was any system of government tried by so
continuous and searching a strain as ours during the last three
years; never has any shown itself stronger; and never could that
strength be so directly traced to the virtue and intelligence of the
people,--to that general enlightenment and prompt efficiency of
public opinion possible only under the influence of a political
framework like our own. We find it hard to understand how even a
foreigner should be blind to the grandeur of the combat of ideas
that has been going on here,--to the heroic energy, persistency, and
self-reliance of a nation proving that it knows how much dearer
greatness is than mere power; and we own that it is impossible for