and yet insufferably monotonous. But that is
not what they mean. They had better not seek
to express themselves by too definite instances.
They will be understood and believed when they say
that to them America, with its vast spaces from ocean
to ocean, does present itself as one country, not less
worthy than any other of the love which it has actually
inspired; a country which is the home of distinctive
types of manhood and womanhood, bringing their own
addition to the varying forms in which kindness and
courage and truth make themselves admirable to mankind.
The soul of a single people seems to be somewhere
present in that great mass, no less than in some tiny
city State of antiquity. Only it has to struggle,
submerged evermore by a flood of newcomers, and defeated
evermore by difficulties quite unlike those of other
lands; and it struggles seemingly with undaunted and
with rational hope.
Americans are fond of discussing Americanism.
Very often they select as a pattern of it Abraham
Lincoln, the man who kept the North together but has
been pronounced to have been a Southerner in his inherited
character. Whether he was so typical or not,
it is the central fact of this biography that no man
ever pondered more deeply in his own way, or answered
more firmly the question whether there was indeed an
American nationality worth preserving.
LINCOLN’S EARLY CAREER
1. Life at New Salem.
From this talk of large political movements we have
to recall ourselves to a young labouring man with
hardly any schooling, naturally and incurably uncouth,
but with a curious, quite modest, impulse to assert
a kindly ascendency over the companions whom chance
threw in his way, and with something of the gift,
which odd, shy people often possess, for using their
very oddity as a weapon in their struggles. In
the conditions of real equality which still prevailed
in a newly settled country it is not wonderful that
he made his way into political life when he was twenty-five,
but it was not till twenty years later that he played
an important part in events of enduring significance.
Thus the many years of public activity with which
we are concerned in this and the following chapter
belong rather to his apprenticeship than to his life’s
work; and this apprenticeship at first sight contrasts
more strongly with his fame afterwards than does his
boyhood of poverty and comparatively romantic hardship.
For many poor boys have lived to make a great mark
on history, but as a rule they have entered early on
a life either of learning or of adventure or of large
business. But the affairs in which Lincoln early
became immersed have an air of pettiness, and from
the point of view of most educated men and women in
the Eastern States or in Europe, many of the associates
and competitors of his early manhood, to whom he had
to look up as his superiors in knowledge, would certainly
