As it is he was not commended to the people of America and must not be commended to us by the absence of defects as a ruler or as a man, but by the qualities to which his defects belonged.  An acute literary man wrote of Lincoln, when he had been three years in office, these remarkable words:  “You can’t help feeling an interest in him, a sympathy and a kind of pity; feeling, too, that he has some qualities of great value, yet fearing that his weak points may wreck him or may wreck something.  His life seems a series of wise, sound conclusions, slowly reached, oddly worked out, on great questions with constant failures in administration of detail and dealings with individuals.”  It was evidently a clever man who wrote this; he would have been a wise man if he had known that the praise he was bestowing on Lincoln was immeasurably greater than the blame.

So the natural prejudice of those who welcomed Lincoln as a prophet in the Cooper Institute but found his candidature for the Presidency ridiculous, was not wholly without justification.  His partisans, however—­also not unjustly—­used his humble origin for all it was worth.  The Republicans of Illinois were assembled at Decatur in preparation for the Chicago Convention, when, amid tumultuous cheers, there marched in old John Hanks and another pioneer bearing on their shoulders two long fence rails labelled:  “Two rails from a lot made by Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks in the Sangamon Bottom in the year 1830.”  “Gentlemen,” said Lincoln, in response to loud calls, “I suppose you want to know something about those things.  Well, the truth is, John Hanks and I did make rails in the Sangamon Bottom.  I don’t know whether we made those rails or not; fact is, I don’t think they are a credit to the makers.  But I do know this:  I made rails then, and I think I could make better ones than these now.”  It is unnecessary to tell of the part those rails were to play in the coming campaign.  It is a contemptible trait in books like that able novel “Democracy,” that they treat the sentiment which attached to the “Rail-splitter” as anything but honourable.

The Republican Convention met at Chicago in circumstances of far less dignity than the Democratic Convention at Charleston.  Processions and brass bands, rough fellows collected by Lincoln’s managers, rowdies imported from New York by Seward’s, filled the streets with noise; and the saloon keepers did good business.  Yet the actual Convention consisted of grave men in an earnest mood.  Besides Seward and Chase and Lincoln, Messrs. Cameron of Pennsylvania and Bates of Missouri, of whom we shall hear later, were proposed for the Presidency.  So also were Messrs. Dayton and Collamer, politicians of some repute; and McLean, of the Supreme Court, had some supporters.  The prevalent expectation in the States was that Seward would easily secure the nomination, but it very soon appeared in the Convention that his opponents were too strong for that.  Several ballots took