PREFACE.


The question will naturally be raised, Why should there be another Life
of Lincoln? This may be met by a counter question, Will there ever be a
time in the near future when there will _not_ be another Life of
Lincoln? There is always a new class of students and a new enrolment of
citizens. Every year many thousands of young people pass from the
Grammar to the High School grade of our public schools. Other thousands
are growing up into manhood and womanhood. These are of a different
constituency from their fathers and grandfathers who remember the civil
war and were perhaps in it.

"To the younger generation," writes Carl Schurz, "Abraham Lincoln has
already become a half mythical figure, which, in the haze of historic
distance, grows to more and more heroic proportions, but also loses in
distinctness of outline and figure." The last clause of this remark is
painfully true. To the majority of people now living, his outline and
figure are dim and vague. There are to-day professors and presidents of
colleges, legislators of prominence, lawyers and judges, literary men,
and successful business men, to whom Lincoln is a tradition. It cannot
be expected that a person born after the year (say) 1855, could
remember Lincoln more than as a name. Such an one's ideas are made up
not from his remembrance and appreciation of events as they occurred,
but from what he has read and heard about them in subsequent years.

The great mine of information concerning the facts of Lincoln's life
is, and probably will always be, the History by his secretaries,