commonwealth of freemen. And it is for qualities such as these that
we firmly believe History will rank Mr. Lincoln among the most
prudent of statesmen and the most successful of rulers. If we wish
to appreciate him, we have only to conceive the inevitable chaos in
which we should now be weltering, had a weak man or an unwise
one been chosen in his stead.

"Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, "without brother behind it;"
and this is, by analogy, true of an elective magistracy. The
hereditary ruler in any critical emergency may reckon on the
inexhaustible resources of *prestige,* of sentiment, of superstition,
of dependent interest, while the new man must slowly and painfully
create all these out of the unwilling material around him, by
superiority of character, by patient singleness of purpose, by
sagacious presentiment of popular tendencies and instinctive
sympathy with the national character. Mr. Lincoln's task was one
of peculiar and exceptional difficulty. Long habit had accustomed
the American people to the notion of a party in power, and of a
President as its creature and organ, while the more vital fact, that
the executive for the time being represents the abstract idea of
government as a permanent principle superior to all party and all
private interest, had gradually become unfamiliar. They had so long
seen the public policy more or less directed by views of party, and
often even of personal advantage, as to be ready to suspect the
motives of a chief magistrate compelled, for the first time in our
history, to feel himself the head and hand of a great nation, and to
act upon the fundamental maxim, laid down by all publicists, that
the first duty of a government is to depend and maintain its own
existence. Accordingly, a powerful weapon seemed to be put into
the hands of the opposition by the necessity under which the