Abraham Lincoln
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life. He was not a man who held it good public economy to pull
down on the mere chance of rebuilding better. Mr. Lincoln's faith
in God was qualified by a very well-founded distrust of the wisdom
of man. perhaps it was his want of self-confidence that more than
anything else won him the unlimited confidence of the people, for
they felt that there would be no need of retreat from any position he
had deliberately taken. The cautious, but steady, advance of his
policy during the war was like that of a Roman army. He left
behind him a firm road on which public confidence could follow; he
took America with him where he went; what he gained he occupied,
and his advanced posts became colonies. The very homeliness of
his genius was its distinction. His kingship was conspicuous by its
workday homespun. Never was ruler so absolute as he, nor so little
conscious of it; for he was the incarnate common-sense of the
people. With all that tenderness of nature whose sweet sadness
touched whoever saw him with something of its own pathos, there
was no trace of sentimentalism in his speech or action. He seems to
have had one rule of conduct, always that of practical and
successful politics, to let himself be guided by events, when they
were sure to bring him out where he wished to go, though by what
seemed to unpractical minds, which let go the possible to grasp at
the desirable, a longer road.

Undoubtedly the highest function of statesmanship is by degrees to
accommodate the conduct of communities to ethical laws, and to
subordinate the conflicting self-interests of the day to higher and
more permanent concerns. But it is on the understanding, and not
on the sentiment, of a nation that all safe legislation must be based.
Voltaire's saying, that "a consideration of petty circumstances is the
tomb of great things," may be true of individual men, but it certainly
is not true of governments. It is by a multitude of such
considerations, each in itself trifling, but all together weighty, that
the framers of policy can alone divine what is practicable and
therefore wise. The imputation of inconsistency is one to which