been one of great pecuniary loss.  I now distinctly say this:  If you shall be appointed a delegate to Chicago I will furnish one hundred dollars to bear the expenses of the trip.”  The Kansas gentleman failed to obtain the support of the Kansas delegates as a body for Lincoln.  Lincoln none the less held to his promise of a hundred dollars if the man came to Chicago; and, having, we are assured, much confidence in him, took the earliest opportunity of appointing him to a lucrative office, besides consulting him as to other appointments in Kansas.  This is all that we know of the affair, but our informant presents it as one of a number of instances in which Lincoln good-naturedly trusted a man too soon, and obstinately clung to his mistake.  As to the appointment, the man had evidently begun by soliciting money in a way which would have marked him to most of us as a somewhat unsuitable candidate for any important post; and the payment of the hundred dollars plainly transgresses a code both of honour and of prudence which most politicians will recognise and which should not need definition.  To say, as Lincoln probably said to himself, that there is nothing intrinsically wrong in a moderate payment for expenses to a fellow worker in a public cause, whom you believe to have sacrificed much, is to ignore the point, indeed several points.  Lincoln, hungry now for some success in his own unrewarded career, was tempted to a small manoeuvre by which he might pick up a little support; he was at the same time tempted, no less, to act generously (according to his means) towards a man who, he readily believed, had made sacrifices like his own.  He was not the man to stand against this double temptation.

Petty lapses of this order, especially when the delinquent may be seen to hesitate and excuse himself, are more irritating than many larger and more brazen offences, for they give us the sense of not knowing where we are.  When they are committed by a man of seemingly strong and high character, it is well to ask just what they signify.  Some of the shrewdest observers of Lincoln, friendly and unfriendly, concur in their description of the weaknesses of which this incident may serve as the example, weaknesses partly belonging to his temperament, but partly such as a man risen from poverty, with little variety of experience and with no background of home training, stands small chance of escaping.  For one thing his judgment of men and how to treat them was as bad in some ways as it was good in others.  His own sure grasp of the largest and commonest things in life, and his sober and measured trust in human nature as a whole, gave him a rare knowledge of the mind of the people in the mass.  So, too, when he had known a man long, or been with him or against him in important transactions, he sometimes developed great insight and sureness of touch; and, when the man was at bottom trustworthy, his robust confidence in him was sometimes of great