needs. Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his career,
though we have sometimes in our impatience thought otherwise,
has always waited, as a wise man should, till the right moment
brought up all his reserves. *Semper nocuit differre paratis,*(2) is
a sound axiom, but the really efficacious man will also be sure to
know when he is *not* ready, and be firm against all persuasion
and reproach till he is.

(1) Time and I. Cardinal Mazarin was prime-minister of Louis
XIV. of France. Time, Mazarin said, was his prime-minister.
(2) It is always bad for those who are ready to put off action.

One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms made on
Mr. Lincoln's course by those who mainly agree with him in
principle, that the chief object of a statesman should be rather to
proclaim his adhesion to certain doctrines, than to achieve their
triumph by quietly accomplishing his ends. In our opinion, there is
no more unsafe politician than a conscientiously rigid *doctrinaire,*
nothing more sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of
policy that admits of no pliability for contingencies. True, there is a
popular image of an impossible He, in whose plastic hands the
submissive destinies of mankind become as wax, and to whose
commanding necessity the toughest facts yield with the graceful
pliancy of fiction; but in real life we commonly find that the men
who control circumstances, as it is called, are those who have
learned to allow for the influence of their eddies, and have the nerve
to turn them to account at the happy instant. Mr. Lincoln's perilous
task has been to carry a rather shaky raft through the rapids,
making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch opportunity, and
the country is to be congratulated that he did not think it his duty to