the armies of the North. It is short, and it deals with a theme on which
hundreds of letters are written daily. But I do not know where the
nobility of self-sacrifice for a great cause, and of the consolation
which the thought of a sacrifice so made should bring, is set forth with
such simple and pathetic beauty. Deep must be the fountains from which
there issues so pure a stream.

The career of Lincoln is often held up to ambitious young Americans as
an example to show what a man may achieve by his native strength, with
no advantages of birth or environment or education. In this there is
nothing improper, nothing fanciful. The moral is one which may well be
drawn, and in which those on whose early life Fortune has not smiled may
find encouragement. But the example is, after all, no great
encouragement to ordinary men, for Lincoln was an extraordinary man.

He triumphed over the adverse conditions of his early years because
Nature had bestowed on him high and rare powers. Superficial observers
who saw his homely aspect and plain manners, and noted that his
fellow-townsmen, when asked why they so trusted him, answered that it
was for his common-sense, failed to see that his common-sense was a part
of his genius. What is common-sense but the power of seeing the
fundamentals of any practical question, and of disengaging them from the
accidental and transient features that may overlie these
fundamentals--the power, to use a familiar expression, of getting down
to bed rock? One part of this power is the faculty for perceiving what
the average man will think and can be induced to do. This is what keeps
the superior mind in touch with the ordinary mind, and this is perhaps
why the name of "common-sense" is used, because the superior mind seems
in its power of comprehending others to be itself a part of the general
sense of the community. All men of high practical capacity have this