[Illustration:  HOUSE IN WHICH LINCOLN LIVED WHEN HE WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT]

And when, at last, after thirty years of endeavor, success had beaten down defeat, when Lincoln had been nominated, elected, and inaugurated, came the crowning trial of his faith and constancy.  When the people, by free and lawful choice, had placed honor and power in his hands, when his name could convene Congress, approve laws, cause ships to sail and armies to move, there suddenly came upon the government and the nation a fatal paralysis.  Honor seemed to dwindle and power to vanish.  Was he then, after all, not to be President?  Was patriotism dead?  Was the Constitution only a bit of waste paper?  Was the Union gone?

The outlook was indeed grave.  There was treason in Congress, treason in the Supreme Court, treason in the army and navy.  Confusion and discord were everywhere.  To use Mr. Lincoln’s forcible figure of speech, sinners were calling the righteous to repentance.  Finally the flag, insulted and fired upon, trailed in surrender at Sumter; and then came the humiliation of the riot at Baltimore, and the President for a few days practically a prisoner in the capital of the nation.

[Illustration:  PRESIDENT LINCOLN AND TAD]

But his apprenticeship had been served, and there was to be no more failure.  With faith and justice and generosity he conducted for four long years a war whose frontiers stretched from the Potomac to the Rio Grande; whose soldiers numbered a million men on each side.  The labor, the thought, the responsibility, the strain of mind and anguish of soul that he gave to his great task, who can measure?  “Here was place for no holiday magistrate, no fair-weather sailor,” as Emerson justly said of him.  “The new pilot was hurried to the helm in a tornado.  In four years—­four years of battle days—­his endurance, his fertility of resources, his magnanimity, were sorely tried and never found wanting.”  “By his courage, his justice, his even temper, ... his humanity, he stood a heroic figure in a heroic epoch.”

[Illustration:  THE LINCOLN MONUMENT AT SPRINGFIELD]

What but a lifetime’s schooling in disappointment; what but the pioneer’s self-reliance and freedom from prejudice; what but the clear mind quick to see natural right and unswerving in its purpose to follow it; what but the steady self-control, the unwarped sympathy, the unbounded charity of this man with spirit so humble and soul so great, could have carried him through the labors he wrought to the victory he attained?

With truth it could be written, “His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.”  So, “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gave him to see the right,” he lived and died.  We, who have never seen him, yet feel daily the influence of his kindly life, and cherish among our most precious possessions the heritage of his example.