said this to the President?’ I asked.  ‘No,’ said Grant.  ’I have not thought it worth while to assure the President of my opinion.  I consider it as important for the cause that he should be elected as that the army should be successful in the field.’” “I told you,” said Lincoln afterwards, “they could not get him to run till he had closed out the rebellion.”  Since the great danger was now only that McClellan would become President in March, there was but one thing to do—­to try and finish the war before then.  Raymond’s advice in favour of negotiations with the South now came, and Lincoln’s mode of replying to this has been noticed.  Rumours were afloat that if McClellan won in November there would be an attempt to bring him irregularly into power at once.  Lincoln let it be known that he should stay at his post at all costs till the last lawful day.  On August 23, in that curious way in which deep emotion showed itself with him, he wrote a resolution upon a paper, which he folded and asked his ministers to endorse with their signatures without reading it.  They all wrote their names on the back of it, ready, if that were possible, to commit themselves blindly to support of him in whatever he had resolved; a great tribute to him and to themselves.  He sealed it up and put it away.

How far in this dark time the confidence of the people had departed from Lincoln no one can tell.  It might be too sanguine a view of the world to suppose that they would have been proof against what may be called a conspiracy to run him down.  There were certainly quarters in which the perception of his worth came soon and remained.  Not all those who are poor or roughly brought up were among those plain men whose approval Lincoln desired and often expected; but at least the plain man does exist and the plain people did read Lincoln’s words.  The soldiers of the armies in the East by this time knew Lincoln well, and there were by now, as we shall see, in every part of the North, honest parents who had gone to Washington, and entered the White House very sad, and came out very happy, and taken their report of him home.  No less could there be found, among those to whom America had given the greatest advantages that birth and upbringing can offer, families in which, when Lincoln died, a daughter could write to her father as Lady Harcourt (then Miss Lily Motley) wrote:  “I echo your ‘thank God’ that we always appreciated him before he was taken from us.”  But if we look at the political world, we find indeed noble exceptions such as that of Charles Sumner among those who had been honestly perplexed by Lincoln’s attitude on slavery; we have to allow for the feelings of some good State Governor who had come to him with a tiresome but serious proposition and been adroitly parried with an untactful and coarse apologue; yet it remains to be said that a thick veil, woven of self-conceit and half-education, blinded most politicians to any rare quality in Lincoln, and blinded them to