*bienseance.* It is no concern of ours, nor does it affect his fitness
for the high place he so worthily occupies; but he is certainly as
fortunate as Henry in the matter of good looks, if we may trust
contemporary evidence. Mr. Lincoln has also been reproached with
Americanism by some not unfriendly British critics; but, with all
deference, we cannot say that we like him any the worse for it, or
see in it any reason why he should govern Americans the less
wisely.

(1) One of Henry's titles was Prince of Bearn, that being the old
province of France from which he came.

People of more sensitive organizations may be shocked, but we are
glad that in this our true war of independence, which is to free us
forever from the Old World, we have had at the head of our affairs
a man whom America made, as God made Adam, out of the very
earth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown, to show us how much
truth, how much magnanimity, and how much statecraft await the
call of opportunity in simple manhood when it believes in the justice
of God and the worth of man. Conventionalities are all very well in
their proper place, but they shrivel at the touch of nature like
stubble in the fire. The genius that sways a nation by its arbitrary
will seems less august to us than that which multiplies and
reinforces itself in the instincts and convictions of an entire people.
Autocracy may have something in it more melodramatic than this,
but falls far short of it in human value and interest.

Experience would have bred in us a rooted distrust of improved
statesmanship, even if we did not believe politics to be a science,
which, if it cannot always command men of special aptitude and