These twenty years that elapsed from the time of his establishment as a
lawyer and legislator in Springfield, the new capital of Illinois,
furnished a fitting theatre for the development and display of his great
faculties, and, with his new and enlarged opportunities, he obviously
grew in mental stature in this second period of his career, as if to
compensate for the absolute lack of advantages under which he had
suffered in youth. As his powers enlarged, his reputation extended, for
he was always before the people, felt a warm sympathy with all that
concerned them, took a zealous part in the discussion of every public
question, and made his personal influence ever more widely and deeply
felt.

My, brethren of the legal profession will naturally ask me, how could
this rough backwoodsman, whose youth had been spent in the forest or on
the farm and the flatboat, without culture or training, education or
study, by the random reading, on the wing, of a few miscellaneous law
books, become a learned and accomplished lawyer? Well, he never did. He
never would have earned his salt as a 'Writer' for the 'Signet', nor have
won a place as advocate in the Court of Session, where the technique of
the profession has reached its highest perfection, and centuries of
learning and precedent are involved in the equipment of a lawyer. Dr.
Holmes, when asked by an anxious young mother, "When should the education
of a child begin?" replied, "Madam, at least two centuries before it is
born!" and so I am sure it is with the Scots lawyer.

But not so in Illinois in 1840. Between 1830 and 1880 its population
increased twenty-fold, and when Lincoln began practising law in
Springfield in 1837, life in Illinois was very crude and simple, and so
were the courts and the administration of justice. Books and libraries