Albuquerque morning journal. [volume] (Albuquerque, N.M.) 1903-1926, 1915-02-20

AS the decades pass the figure of
Abraham Lincoln looms up greater
anL greater. Time Is giving us the
right perspective and each year makes
him seem more of miracle. Yet IN
sober truth no man ever had less or
the miraculous In his history. His
rise was not even sudden, but by the
slowest and most tedious gradati0n.
Every step has been distinctly traced, |
and there is not one Of them that any
other man might not have taken.
Where he differed from other men
was in the fact that he never stopped
stepping until he reached the dizzy
height of power and influence. 1t did
not make him dizzy, because he had
assembled so slowly.
Lincoln began absolutely at the bot
tom, and when he stood on the steps
of the cnpltol in 1865 to deliver his
second inaugural address he was the
embodiment of forty-six years Of
careful self-educatlon The world
soon rang with applause for the wise
and prophetic speech. and the Lon
don Times said the inaugural was the
greatest state paper of the century.
But whence came the flawless logic
and the faultless formY According To
his own account, Lincoln went TO
school "by littles;" lin all, II did not
amount TO more than year Scarce
~ one OF his teachers could SO be-
You'd "readin', writin and cipherin
to the rule Of three" Such a curric-
ulum was not likely to lead to the
greatest state paper of the century
such course of education was hardly
planned for the making of a pres-
dent The great secret lay elsewhere
lin Llncoln's determination TO make
q man of himself
Seeking knowledge Afoot.
Shut off from schools and colleges,
Lincoln read and studied every book
he could find. His fathers library
was pitifully small, so he borrowed
far and wide. He once told a friend
that he had read through every book
he had ever heard of in that country
for circuit of fifty miles" With
nothing but a turkey-buzzard pen and
home made ink, he made a careful
synopsis or copied long extracts from
everything he read. These he oom-
mitted to memory. Shingles, boards,
shovels, doors, served as note hooks
when he ran short OF paper He al
ways kept a book In the crack of the
logs by his rough bed. ready to seize
the lDOtltHt tie ANVht III tiit mum"
Ing. He carried books with him
wherever he went. valued every spare
moment MS an opportunity for read
ing. even chose his occupations with
view to the chances they offered for
study.
Difficulties could not daunt man
who early In life had cultivated such
habit When Lincoln began TO
study law he had to tramp twenty
| miles every time he wanted a law
book In doing so he would read and
| digest about forty pages each trip. lie
never allowed the subject matter to
slip from his mind. when manual la
Dor made IL impossible for him to be
reading he would reeite aloud what
he had last read and fix II forever IN
| bis mind. Twenty years after this
time, when he was an acknowledged
| leader OF the Illinois bar, he gave the
| following advice TO a young man who
wished to become lawyer: Get
! books and read and study them
carefully. Begin with Blackstone's
| Commentaries. and after reading
carefully through say twice. take up
| Chtty's Pleading, Greenleafs Evil
denee' and Story's Equity in sue
cession. Work, work, work, is the
main thing
At the age of "a Lincoln saw that
! there was not much of a future in
| general storekeeping. He was offered
the position Of deputy county survey
or. The emily difficulty in the way of
| accepting was that he knew ahso-
lutely nothing about surveying. But
what did such a trivial obstacle
amount to? He borrowed Flint and
! Gihson's treatise on the subject and
bent his viii to the task of mastering
Il. He worked as II his temporal and
! eternal well-being depended upon the
effort; everything else was banished,
friends. pleasures and food were al
| most forgotten; day and night he
kept az It, denying himself sleep, un-
I'll he was pale and haggard and the
neighhors expostulated In six weeks
he had mastered every branch of the
subject upon which he could get any