The age-herald., 1897-11-21
pY IoHN VI. DUBosR.
REPRESENTATIVES.

government to dispose of great problems in rush. If John Adams had been given two terms instead of one to carry out his nn-Amerlcan policy, Jefferson's succession, when it might tollow, would have found a ripened instead of callow public sentiment ready for his own the ories. Adams cunningly commissioned John Marshall chef justice thirty days before Jefferson took the oath of office as president. This was catastrophe to Jeffersonian prospects.
 The struggle Jefferson had made was only of two or three years extent, not long enough to educate the. people ex- cept against the two famous statutes, the alien law and the sedition law. Jeff ferson had hopsd to strike effectively at the money power erected by Hamilton with great skill and at the growing usur- patton of the federal judiciary. Adams threw Marshall across his way and Hamilton, in stirring up congress and New England upon the matter. of the embargo, diverted public attentions
 Thus the country drifted onto Lincoln.
 Was Abraham Lincoln "a perfectly level mirror?" Did he step upon the plane of the American idea, honest with the great volume of deep and wholesome knowledge that lay open before Ameri- can governors of his day, or did he leap with a spasmodic superstition into the very crisis of the complex intellectual system?
 Was not Lincoln a disfigured mirror, traversed with concavities and convexi- ties rejecting creations all-powerful to deceive the primitive clements of the American idea and crush downward that thought which was the fundamental gos- pei of a great, vital, intellectual sys- tenn working all together, the original American mystery of fires dom by lib erty made law; that law unlike all oth- CTS, that is not an aggregate of forces, but rather a whole of afiinities working consciously upon natural questions and conditions?
 Mahomet to rule put up a theocracy; Cromwell to rule put up a theocracy. We are not troubled much to know what Lincoln tried to do and why, when we turn about to see what he tried to undo. The world in habitable form came first and next the inhabitants of the world. So with American consttutionalism The system was here in the embrace of time when Washington first bespoke it. There was no room for tragedy in the enjoyment of it. If at the discovery all the kingship of the old times had not been driven out and banishad, there was provided inherent power within the system for its own purification, gener- ation following generation.
 Lincoln walked the deck of a Missis- sippi river pole boat, showing by main force his cargo of flour and hides, ship knees and wild honey to market at New Orleans, typical American of the west ern boundary; Cornelius Vanderbilt pulled the oar in the passenger service on the waters of New York harbor, a typical American of the eastern boun- dary. In Montgomery county, Alabama, contemporaneously with these an ob scure young man, Thomas Barnett by name, toiled dependent solely on his own talents and energies. There was no complaint against the law of the union then. Barnett. prospered apacs with Vanderbilt in this worlds goods. He was probably as rich as Vanderbilt while both lived He died in the prime of life, supposed to be worth a million in
 
 property in the Tallassee cotton mill, which he had founded. He was not the only cotton planter in Montgomery coun- ty worth million before Lincoln took to statecraft as trade.
 These psrsonal illustrations are not worthless when we set out to inquire whether Lincoln was a level mirror set  disfigured with cracks and blurs.
 Under the conditions from which Americans received America from the mother country and her enemies, France and Spain, we had to receive charge Of two colored races one red and aborigin- al, the other black and imported. We set n early and systematically to sw.nd'e and slaughter the rsds and deport the remnants; We were neither able or will- ing to deport the blacks. Our system, north and south consenting, in conven- tion provided for their propagation.
 Under these co-eval facts with the birth of America, did the merits of MT. Lin coln grow around their substance? Was he man of order, stern enough for a true missionary of the American idea in the crisis of its life?
 It was the duty of MT. Lincoln to know that the wonderful diversity of nature in the heavens and on the earth, in lands and waters, in herbs, grasses, forests, fishes and briites was likewise law that attached to the genus homo. He could have known and it was his duty to know that in the alluvia of the Mississippi river swamps, in the deposits of the pe- ninsula of Florida, in caves in South America human fossils are found show ing that the type of man Columbus found in the new world had been here ages without record. So in Europe. the earli- est known type was found in fossil.
 The black African brought here was known 4Oe0 years at least in exactly the same type The terrestrial distribution of the genus homo was ancient beyond all reckoning and the type was ineradi- cable.
 It was the duty of MT. Lincoln in the presence of his great political promo oat a