which he spent in intellectual diversion may have diminished to some extent his practical efficiency previous to the gathering crisis.  It certainly made him less inclined to the aggressive self-assertion which a successful political career demanded.  But when the crisis came, when the minds of Northern patriots were stirred by the ugly alternative offered to them by the South, and when Lincoln was by the course of events restored to active participation in politics, he soon showed that he had reached the highest of all objects of personal culture.  While still remaining one of a body of men who, all unconsciously, impoverished their minds in order to increase the momentum of their practical energy, he none the less achieved for himself a mutually helpful relation between a firm will and a luminous intelligence.  The training of his mind, the awakening of his imagination, the formation of his taste and style, the humorous dramatizing of his experience,—­all this discipline had failed to pervert his character, narrow his sympathies, or undermine his purposes.  His intelligence served to enlighten his will, and his will, to establish the mature decisions of his intelligence.  Late in life the two faculties became in their exercise almost indistinguishable.  His judgments, in so far as they were decisive, were charged with momentum, and his actions were instinct with sympathy and understanding.

Just because his actions were instinct with sympathy and understanding, Lincoln was certainly the most humane statesman who ever guided a nation through a great crisis.  He always regarded other men and acted towards them, not merely as the embodiment of an erroneous or harmful idea, but as human beings, capable of better things; and consequently all of his thoughts and actions looked in the direction of a higher level of human association.  It is this characteristic which makes him a better and, be it hoped, a more prophetic democrat than any other national American leader.  His peculiar distinction does not consist in the fact that he was a “Man of the People” who passed from the condition of splitting rails to the condition of being President.  No doubt he was in this respect as good a democrat as you please, and no doubt it was desirable that he should be this kind of a democrat.  But many other Americans could be named who were also men of the people, and who passed from the most insignificant to the most honored positions in American life.  Lincoln’s peculiar and permanent distinction as a democrat will depend rather upon the fact that his thoughts and his actions looked towards the realization of the highest and most edifying democratic ideal.  Whatever his theories were, he showed by his general outlook and behavior that democracy meant to him more than anything else the spirit and principle of brotherhood.  He was the foremost to deny liberty to the South, and he had his sensible doubts about the equality between the negro and the white man; but he actually treated