of action of their great leader, the first President.  Even then when the animosities and suspicions had died away, while the people were ready to honour the high character and the accomplishments of Washington, the feeling was one of reverence rather than of affection.  This sentiment gave rise later to the title of the “Father of his Country”; but there was no such personal feeling towards Washington as warranted, at least during his life, the term father of the people.  Thirty years later, the ruler of the nation is Andrew Jackson, a man who was, like Lincoln, eminently a representative of the common people.  His fellow-citizens knew that Jackson understood their feelings and their methods and were ready to have full confidence in Jackson’s patriotism and honesty of purpose.  His nature lacked, however, the sweet sympathetic qualities that characterised Lincoln; and while to a large body of his fellow-citizens he commended himself for sturdiness, courage, and devotion to the interests of the state, he was never able for himself to overcome the feeling that a man who failed to agree with a Jackson policy must be either a knave or a fool.  He could not place himself in the position from which the other fellow was thinking or acting.  He believed that it was his duty to maintain what he held to be the popular cause against the “schemes of the aristocrats,” the bugbear of that day.  He was a fighter from his youth up and his theory of government was that of enforcing the control of the side for which he was the partisan.  Such a man could never be accepted as the father of the people.

Lincoln, coming from those whom he called the common people, feeling with their feelings, sympathetic with their needs and ideals, was able in the development of his powers to be accepted as the peer of the largest intellects in the land.  While knowing what was needed by the poor whites of Kentucky, he could understand also the point of view of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia.  In place of emphasising antagonisms, he held consistently that the highest interest of one section of the country must be the real interest of the whole people, and that the ruler of the nation had upon him the responsibility of so shaping the national policy that all the people should recognise the government as their government.  It was this large understanding and width of sympathy that made Lincoln in a sense which could be applied to no other ruler of this country, the people’s President, and no other ruler in the world has ever been so sympathetically, so effectively in touch with all of the fellow-citizens for whose welfare he made himself responsible.  The Latin writer, Aulus Gellius, uses for one of his heroes the term “a classic character.”  These words seem to me fairly to apply to Abraham Lincoln.

An appreciative Englishman, writing in the London Nation at the time of the Centennial commemoration, says of Lincoln: