them from sons in hospitals; luxurious frauds prating of their loyalty for the sake of property exemptions; inventors with every imaginable strange device; politicians seeking to cajole him; politicians bluntly threatening him; cashiered officers demanding justice; men with grievances of a myriad sorts; nameless statesmen who sought to teach him his duty; clergymen in large numbers, generally with the same purpose; deputations from churches, societies, political organizations, commissions, trades unions, with every sort of message from flattery to denunciation; and best of all, simple, confiding people who wanted only to say, “We trust you—­God bless you!”

There was a method in this madness of accessibility.  Its deepest inspiration, to be sure, was kindness.  In reply to a protest that he would wear himself out listening to thousands of requests most of which could not be granted, he replied with one of those smiles in which there was so much sadness, “They don’t want much; they get but little, and I must see them."(3)

But there was another inspiration.  His open doors enabled him to study the American people, every phase of it, good and bad.  “Men moving only in an official circle,” said he, “are apt to become merely official—­not to say arbitrary—­in their ideas, and are apter and apter with each passing day to forget that they only hold power in a representative capacity. . . .  Many of the matters brought to my notice are utterly frivolous, but others are of more or less importance, and all serve to renew in me a clearer and more vivid image of that great popular assemblage out of which I sprung, and to which at the end of two years I must return. . . .  I call these receptions my public opinion baths; for I have but little time to read the papers, and gather public opinion that way; and though they may not be pleasant in all their particulars, the effect as a whole, is renovating and invigorating to my perceptions of responsibility and duty."(4)

He did not allow his patience to be abused with evil intent.  He read his suppliants swiftly.  The profiteer, the shirk, the fraud of any sort, was instantly unmasked.  “I’ll have nothing to do with this business,” he burst out after listening to a gentlemanly profiteer; “nor with any man who comes to me with such degrading propositions.  What!  Do you take the President of the United States to be a commission broker?  You have come to the wrong place, and for you and for every one who comes for the same purpose, there is the door."(5)

Lincoln enjoyed this indiscriminate mixing with people.  It was his chief escape from care.  He saw no reason why his friends should Commiserate him because of the endless handshaking.  That was a small matter compared with the interest he took in the ever various stream of human types.  Sometimes, indeed, he would lapse into a brown study in the midst of a reception.  Then he “would shake hands with thousands of people, seemingly unconscious of what he was doing,