Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/382

568

at this extraordinary knowledge of it, so that Von Moltke was not a better general, or an abler planner or expounder of a campaign, than was President Lincoln. To sum it up, he was a born leader of men. He knew human nature; he knew what chord to strike, and was never afraid to strike it when he believed that the time had arrived.

Mr. Lincoln was not what is called an educated man. In the college that he attended a man gets up at daylight to hoe corn, and sits up at night by the side of a burning pine-knot to read the best book he can find. What education he had, he had picked up. He had read a great many books, and all the books that he had read he knew. He had a tenacious memory, just as he had the ability to see the essential thing. He never took an unimportant point and went off upon that; but he always laid hold of the real question, and attended to that, giving no more thought to other points than was indispensably necessary.

Thus, while we say that Mr. Lincoln was an uneducated man in the college sense, he had a singularly perfect education in regard to everything that concerns the practical affairs of life. His judgment was excellent, and his information was always accurate. He knew what the thing was. He was a man of genius, and contrasted with men of education the man of genius will always carry the day. Many of his speeches illustrate this.

I remember very well Mr. Stanton's comment on the Gettysburg speeches of Edward Everett and Mr. Lincoln. "Edward Everett has made a speech," he said, "that will make three columns in the newspapers, and Mr. Lincoln has made a speech of perhaps forty or fifty lines. Everett's is the speech of a scholar, polished to the last possibility. It is elegant, and it is learned; but Lincoln's speech will be read by a thousand men where one reads Everett's, and will be remembered as long as anybody's speeches are remembered who speaks in the English language."

That was the truth. Who ever thinks of or reads Everett's Gettysburg speech now? If one will compare those two speeches he will get an idea how superior genius is to education; how superior that intellectual faculty is which sees the vitality of a question and knows how to state it; how superior that intellectual faculty is which regards everything with the fire of earnestness in the soul, with the relentless purpose of a heart devoted to objects beyond literature.