Abraham Lincoln
Page: 23

the sweet humanity of his nature. Their ignorance sold its vote and
took its money, but all that was left of manhood in them recognized
its saint and martyr.

Mr. Lincoln is not in the habit of saying, "This is *my* opinion, or
*my* theory," but "This is the conclusion to which, in my
judgment, the time has come, and to which, accordingly, the sooner
we come the better for us." His policy has been the policy of public
opinion based on adequate discussion and on a timely recognition
of the influence of passing events in shaping the features of events
to come.

One secret of Mr. Lincoln's remarkable success in captivating the
popular mind is undoubtedly an unconsciousness of self which
enables him, though under the necessity of constantly using the
capital *I*, to do it without any suggestion of egotism. There is no
single vowel which men's mouths can pronounce with such
difference of effect. That which one shall hide away, as it were,
behind the substance of his discourse, or, if he bring it to the front,
shall use merely to give an agreeable accent of individuality to what
he says, another shall make an offensive challenge to the self-
satisfaction of all his hearers, and an unwarranted intrusion upon
each man's sense of personal importance, irritating every pore of his
vanity, like a dry northeast wind, to a goose-flesh of opposition and
hostility. Mr. Lincoln has never studied Quintilian;(1) but he has, in
the earnest simplicity and unaffected Americanism of his own
character, one art of oratory worth all the rest. He forgets himself
so entirely in his object as to give his *I* the sympathetic and
persuasive effect of *We* with the great body of his countrymen.
Homely, dispassionate, showing all the rough-edged process of his
thought as it goes along, yet arriving at his conclusions with an
honest kind of every-day logic, he is so eminently our
representative man, that, when he speaks, it seems as if the people
were listening to their own thinking aloud. The dignity of his
thought owes nothing to any ceremonial garb of words, but to the
manly movement that comes of settled purpose and an energy of