The Glasgow courier. [volume] (Glasgow, Mont.) 1913-current, 1920-02-13

knew n MacnlaVanan character OF -
the man. Nevertheless, he was scarcely dead in St. Helena be-
fore opinion in France united in a vast conspiracy to exalt him
as the most kindly, virtuous and unfortunate of heroes, as well
as the most wonderful of geniuses.
We Americans re manufacturing our heroes, too-in our
own American fashion. We do not desire for the object of our
worship a modern Caesar, as the French do, or a tremendous
"superman" as the Germans did. We magnify the qualities of
heart and sentiment; our ideal is that of the great DEMOCRAT,
sprung from the people, one with the people, an undenomination-
al Christian after the manner of Christ Himself, yet the strong
est and ablest individual of his time.
We have found our great national epic in the great Civil
War, a war as sanguinary and as terrible as any ever waged,
and yet waged with less OF cruelty and more of magnanimlty.
And the hero of the titanic and yet tender struggle is not Grant,
is not Stanton, but Lincoln, the homely, unhappy, soulsorrow-
ing, supremely gifted man.
The law of contrast aids the Lincoln myth. Outwardly he
had so little which the world esteems, while inwardly he pos
sessed what beauty of soul! Born of lowliest stock, uncouth
and ugly beyond belief, uneducated except through %seld-disci-
pine, disappointed in every secret ambition of his heart, a fail
ure by his own confession until he was fifty years of age, Alb
raham Lincoln seemed the sco1n of circumstances, the jest of
fate.
All the derHion, the denial, the despair that can be visited
upon a man, was poured out upon that lonely heart. Life in
every fashion was supremacy cruel to him. But life, despite
her endeavor, failed to warp, to embitter that unique nature.
Lincoln under blows became strong as steel, but the strange
fact, in his heart he grew even tenderer.
Then upon him was put the responsibility of the burden Of
four years of fratricidal war. A Bismarck or a Hollweg could
propose unshudderngly "to bleed France white;' a Bonaparte
could say of battle, "you cannot make an omelette without
breaking eggs" But Lincoln, we know, suffered for that war,
even as One agonized in the Garden of Gethsemane.
However, this soul, this womans compassion, this Christ
like tenderness, was not the whole of Lincoln. We emphasize
nj part II MN, since IL is aMed to u own humanity. But
Lincoln was also a man of marvellous intellectual gifts, so great,
indeed, that they differentiated him from his felowmen and ex-
plain the marked isolation of his life.
Ye are prone to ignore this truth. Yet there is abundant
evidence of the fact. No man in American history in sheer in
telectual power compares with him save Alexander Hamilton
alone, and Hamilton in genius, aside from intellect, was not Lin
coins peer.
Consider Lincolns language, his genius for a phrase, the
quality of his style. Where did he get it? He didn't get it
it was the man! He ruled the nation by his sentences. In them
he expressed a whole political philosophy, expressed it so that
men will remember it for aye.
Lincoln was not born q military genius as Frances hero,
Bonaparte. He was not a born administrator as John D. Rookie
Teller. but Lincoln was that which is supreme and the most rare
of achievements among men-he was a statesman, a great states
man.. Napoleon was a great general and a great administrator,
but not a great statesman. Cromwell was like Napoleon. So
was Frederick the Great. But Lincoln, no general, and an indif-
ferent administrator perhaps, as a statesman ranks with Richie
lieu and Lord Chatham, with Elizabeth of England and William
of Orange, with Bismarck and our own Hamilton.
He understood as no man the genius of our democracy. He
was the great democrat of our history. He was the embodiment
of the spirit of the new democracy that today mandates the
world. May his kind be multiplied a milionfold.
He understood the peril of war. He OWNED the necessity of
fighting to the bitter finish. He knew how to grid the spirit of
the nation to the mighty task. He looked forward to the future
of America, and wished peace and good will to the beaten South.
He possessed, moreover, the magnanimity and the wisdom that
Grafton of hate.
only by their studipity-the assassination of Caesar by Marcus