Abraham Lincoln
Page: 9

Mr. Lincoln's policy was a tentative one, and rightly so. He laid
down no programme which must compel him to be either
inconsistent or unwise, no cast-iron theorem to which
circumstances must be fitted as they rose, or else be useless to his
ends. He seemed to have chosen Mazarin's motto, *Le temps et
moi.*(1) The *moi,* to be sure, was not very prominent at first;
but it has grown more and more so, till the world is beginning to be
persuaded that it stands for a character of marked individuality and
capacity for affairs. Time was his prime-minister, and, we began to
think, at one period, his general-in-chief also. At first he was so
slow that he tired out all those who see no evidence of progress but
in blowing up the engine; then he was so fast, that he took the
breath away from those who think there is no getting on safety
while there is a spark of fire under the boilers. God is the only
being who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to
seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he
needs. Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his career,
though we have sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise,
has always waited, as a wise man should, till the right moment
brought up all his reserves. *Semper nocuit differre paratis,*(2) is
a sound axiom, but the really efficacious man will also be sure to
know when he is *not* ready, and be firm against all persuasion
and reproach till he is.

(1) Time and I. Cardinal Mazarin was prime-minister of Louis
XIV. of France. Time, Mazarin said, was his prime-minister.
(2) It is always bad for those who are ready to put off action.

One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms made on
Mr. Lincoln's course by those who mainly agree with him in
principle, that the chief object of a statesman should be rather to
proclaim his adhesion to certain doctrines, than to achieve their
triumph by quietly accomplishing his ends. In our opinion, there is
no more unsafe politician than a conscientiously rigid *doctrinaire,*
nothing more sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of
policy that admits of no pliability for contingencies. True, there is a