certain truths and principles in phrases so aptly chosen and so
forcible, that one feels as if those truths could have been conveyed in
no other words, and as if this deliverance of them were made for all
time. Words so simple and so strong could have come only from one who
had meditated so long upon the primal facts of American history and
popular government that the truths those facts taught him had become
like the truths of mathematics in their clearness, their breadth, and
their precision.

The speeches on Slavery read strange to us now, when slavery as a living
system has been dead for forty years, dead and buried hell deep under
the detestation of mankind. It is hard for those whose memory does not
go back to 1865 to realize that down till then it was not only a
terrible fact, but was defended--defended by many otherwise good men,
defended not only by pseudo-scientific anthropologists as being in the
order of nature, but by ministers of the Gospel, out of the sacred
Scriptures, as part of the ordinances of God. Lincoln's position, the
position of one who had to induce slave-owning fellow-citizens to listen
to him and admit persuasion into their heated and prejudiced minds, did
not allow him to denounce it with horror, as we can all so easily do
to-day. But though his language is calm and restrained, he never
condescends to palter with slavery. He shows its innate evils and
dangers with unanswerable force. The speech on the Dred Scott decision
is a lucid, close and cogent piece of reasoning which, in its wide view
of Constitutional issues, sometimes reminds one of Webster, sometimes
even of Burke, though it does not equal the former in weight nor the
latter in splendour of diction.

Among the letters, perhaps the most impressive is that written to Mrs.
Bixley, the mother of five sons who had died fighting for the Union in