but few political philosophers would have recognized as possible,--of
leading the republic through four years of furious civil conflict without
any serious detriment to its free institutions.

He was, indeed, while President, violently denounced by the opposition as
a tyrant and a usurper, for having gone beyond his constitutional powers
in authorizing or permitting the temporary suppression of newspapers, and
in wantonly suspending the writ of habeas corpus and resorting to
arbitrary arrests. Nobody should be blamed who, when such things are
done, in good faith and from patriotic motives protests against them. In
a republic, arbitrary stretches of power, even when demanded by
necessity, should never be permitted to pass without a protest on the one
hand, and without an apology on the other. It is well they did not so
pass during our civil war. That arbitrary measures were resorted to is
true. That they were resorted to most sparingly, and only when the
government thought them absolutely required by the safety of the
republic, will now hardly be denied. But certain it is that the history
of the world does not furnish a single example of a government passing
through so tremendous a crisis as our civil war was with so small a
record of arbitrary acts, and so little interference with the ordinary
course of law outside the field of military operations. No American
President ever wielded such power as that which was thrust into Lincoln's
hands. It is to be hoped that no American President ever will have to be
entrusted with such power again. But no man was ever entrusted with it
to whom its seductions were less dangerous than they proved to be to
Abraham Lincoln. With scrupulous care he endeavored, even under the most
trying circumstances, to remain strictly within the constitutional
limitations of his authority; and whenever the boundary became
indistinct, or when the dangers of the situation forced him to cross it,
he was equally careful to mark his acts as exceptional measures,