Page:Samuel Scoville -Abraham Lincoln, His Story.djvu/60

 There is hardly a word from the Latin or the Greek in them.

The use of quaint, homely similies and illustrations was another of Lincoln's methods. When the mayor of New York, in the panic and bewilderment which followed the breaking out of the Civil War, proposed that New York City be taken out of the Union and made a free city—another Hamburg—Lincoln disposed of the plan in one sentence:

When his plan of reconstruction was objected to as not elaborate enough, Lincoln defended it with an illustration:

His speeches were full of homely epigrams which needed only to be heard to be admitted, and which stuck forever in his hearers' memories:

God must have loved the common people, for he made so many of them.

You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.