the Whigs had not till a few years later been induced, for self-preservation, to copy the Democratic machine.  But it is striking that the admiring friend who reports this declaration, “too audacious and emphatic for the statesmen of a later day,” must carefully explain how it could possibly suit the temper of a time which in a few years passed away.  Very soon the question whether a proposal or even a sentiment was timely or premature came to bulk too large in the deliberations of Lincoln’s friends.  The reader will perhaps wonder later whether such considerations did not bulk too largely in Lincoln’s own mind.  Was there in his statesmanship, even in later days when he had great work to do, an element of that opportunism which, if not actually base, is at least cheap?  Or did he come as near as a man with many human weaknesses could come to the wise and nobly calculated opportunism which is not merely the most beneficent statesmanship, but demands a heroic self-mastery?

The main interest of his doings in Illinois politics and in Congress is the help they may give in penetrating his later mind.  On the one hand, it is certain that Lincoln trained himself to be a great student of the fitting opportunity.  He evidently paid very serious attention to the counsels of friends who would check his rasher impulses.  One of his closest associates insists that his impulsive judgment was bad, and he probably thought so himself.  It will be seen later that the most momentous utterance he ever made was kept back through the whole space of two years of crisis at the instance of timid friends.  It required not less courage and was certainly more effective when at last it did come out.  The same great capacity for waiting marks any steps that he took for his own advancement.  Indeed it was a happy thing for him and for his country that his character and the whole cast of his ideas and sympathies were of a kind to which the restraint imposed on an American politician was most congenial and to which therefore it could do least harm.  He was to prove himself a patient man in other ways as well as this.  On many things, perhaps on most, the thoughts he worked out in his own mind diverged very widely from those of his neighbours, but he was not in the least anxious either to conceal or to obtrude them.  His social philosophy as he expressed it to his friends in these days was one which contemplated great future reforms—­abolition of slavery and a strict temperance policy were among them.  But he looked for them with a sort of fatalistic confidence in the ultimate victory of reason, and saw no use and a good deal of harm in premature political agitation for them.  “All such questions,” he is reported to have said, “must find lodgment with the most enlightened souls who stamp them with their approval.  In God’s own time they will be organised into law and thus woven into the fabric of our institutions.”  This seems a little cold-blooded, but perhaps we can already begin to recognise the man who, when the time had fully come, would be on the right side, and in whom the evil which he had deeply but restrainedly hated would find an appallingly wary foe.