Lincoln is one of the many public characters to whom the standing epithet “honest” became attached; in his case the claim to this rested originally on the only conclusive authority, that of his creditors.  But there is equally good authority, that of his biographer, William Herndon, for many years his partner as a lawyer, that “he had no money sense.”  This must be understood with the large qualification that he meant to pay his way and, unlike the great statesmen of the eighteenth century in England, did pay it.  But, though with much experience of poverty in his early career, he never developed even a reasonable desire to be rich.  Wealth remained in his view “a superfluity of the things one does not want.”  He was always interested in mathematics, but mainly as a discipline in thinking, and partly, perhaps, in association with mechanical problems of which he was fond enough to have once in his life patented an invention.  The interest never led him to take to accounts or to long-sighted financial provisions.  In later days, when he received a payment for his fees, his partner’s share would be paid then and there; and perhaps the rent would be paid, and the balance would be spent at once in groceries and other goods likely to be soon wanted, including at long intervals, when the need was very urgent, a new hat.

These are amiable personal traits, but they mark the limitations of his capacity as a statesman.  The chief questions which agitated the Illinois Legislature were economic, and so at first were the issues between Whigs and Democrats in Federal policy.  Lincoln, though he threw himself into these affairs with youthful fervour, would appear never to have had much grasp of such matters.  “In this respect alone,” writes an admirer, “I have always considered Mr. Lincoln a weak man.”  It is only when (rarely, at first) constitutional or moral issues emerge that his politics become interesting.  We can guess the causes which attached him to the Whigs.  As the party out of power, and in Illinois quite out of favour, they had doubtless some advantage in character.  As we have seen, the greatest minds among American statesmen of that day, Webster and Clay, were Whigs.  Lincoln’s simple and quite reasonable, if inconclusive, argument for Protection, can be found among his speeches of some years later.  And schemes of internal development certainly fired his imagination.

After his failure in business Lincoln subsisted for a while on odd jobs for farmers, but was soon employed as assistant surveyor by John Calhoun, then surveyor of the county.  This gentleman, who had been educated as a lawyer but “taught school in preference,” was a keen Democrat, and had to assure Lincoln that office as his assistant would not necessitate his desertion of his principles.  He was a clever man, and Lincoln remembered him long after as the most formidable antagonist he ever met in debate.  With the help, again, of Mentor Graham, Lincoln soon