Throughout these years Lincoln was of course working at law, which became, with the development of the country, a more arduous and a more learned profession.  Sessions of the Legislature did not last long, and political canvasses were only occasional.  If Lincoln was active in these matters he was in many other directions, too, a keen participator in the keen life of the society round him.  Nevertheless politics as such, and apart from any large purpose to be achieved through them, had for many years a special fascination for him.  For one thing he was argumentative in the best sense, with a passion for what the Greeks sometimes called “dialectic”; his rare capacity for solitary thought, the most marked and the greatest of his powers, went absolutely hand in hand with the desire to reduce his thoughts to a form which would carry logical conviction to others.  Further, there can be no doubt—­and such a combination of tastes, though it seems to be uncommon, is quite intelligible—­that the somewhat unholy business of party management was at first attractive to him.  To the end he showed no intuitive comprehension of individual men.  His sincere friendly intention, the unanswerable force of an argument, the convincing analogy veiled in an unseemly story, must take their chance of suiting the particular taste of Senator Sherman or General McClellan; but any question of managing men in the mass—­will a given candidate’s influence with this section of people count for more than his unpopularity with that section? and so on—­involved an element of subtle and long-sighted calculation which was vastly congenial to him.  We are to see him hereafter applying this sort of science on a grand scale and for a great end.  His early discipline in it is a dull subject, interesting only where it displays, as it sometimes does, the perfect fairness with which this ambitious man could treat his own claims as against those of a colleague and competitor.

In forming any judgment of Lincoln’s career it must, further, be realised that, while he was growing up as a statesman, the prevailing conception of popular government was all the time becoming more unfavourable to leadership and to robust individuality.  The new party machinery adopted by the Democrats under Jackson, as the proper mode of securing government by the people, induced a deadly uniformity of utterance; breach of that uniformity was not only rash, but improper.  Once in early days it was demanded in a newspaper that “all candidates should show their hands.”  “Agreed,” writes Lincoln, “here’s mine”; and then follows a young man’s avowal of advanced opinions; he would give the suffrage to “all whites who pay taxes or bear arms, by no means excluding females.”  Disraeli, who was Lincoln’s contemporary, throve by exuberances quite as startling as this, nor has any English politician found it damaging to be bold.  On this occasion indeed (in 1836) Lincoln was far from damaging himself;