request of the District.”  In other words, Lincoln, when suddenly out of the storm and stress that followed Ann’s death his mentality flashes forth, has an attitude toward political power that was not a consequence of his environment, that sets him apart as a type of man rare in the history of statesmanship.  What other American politician of his day—­indeed, very few politicians of any day—­would have dared to assert at once the existence of a power and the moral obligation not to use it?  The instinctive American mode of limiting power is to deny its existence.  Our politicians so deeply distrust our temperament that whatever they may say for rhetorical effect, they will not, whenever there is any danger of their being taken at their word, trust anything to moral law.  Their minds are normally mechanical.  The specific, statutory limitation is the only one that for them has reality.  The truth that temper in politics is as great a factor as law was no more comprehensible to the politicians of 1837 than, say Hamlet or The Last Judgment.  But just this is what the crude young Lincoln understood.  Somehow he had found it in the depths of his own nature.  The explanation, if any, is to be found in his heredity.  Out of the shadowy parts of him, beyond the limits of his or any man’s conscious vision, dim, unexplored, but real and insistent as those forest recesses from which his people came, arise the two ideas:  the faith in a mighty governing power; the equal faith that it should use its might with infinite tenderness, that it should be slow to compel results, even the result of righteousness, that it should be tolerant of human errors, that it should transform them slowly, gradually, as do the gradual forces of nature, as do the sun and the rain.

And such was to be the real Lincoln whenever he spoke out, to the end.  His tonic was struck by his first significant utterance at the age of twenty-eight.  How inevitable that it should have no significance to the congregation of good fellows who thought of him merely as one of their own sort, who put up with their friend’s vagary, and speedily forgot it.

The moment was a dreary one in Lincoln’s fortunes.  By dint of much reading of borrowed books, he had succeeded in obtaining from the easy-going powers that were in those days, a license to practise law.  In the spring of 1837 he removed to Springfield.  He had scarcely a dollar in his pocket.  Riding into Springfield on a borrowed horse, with all the property he owned, including his law books, in two saddlebags, he went to the only cabinet-maker in the town and ordered a single bedstead.  He then went to the store of Joshua F. Speed.  The meeting, an immensely eventful one for Lincoln, as well as a classic in the history of genius in poverty, is best told in Speed’s words:  “He came into my store, set his saddle-bags on the counter and inquired what the furnishings for a single bedstead would cost.  I took slate and pencil, made a calculation