Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/62

36 unlike in their methods of reasoning and their judgment of means.

Abraham Lincoln was a true child of the people. There was in his heart an inexhaustible fountain of tenderness, and from it sprang that longing to be true, just and merciful to all, which made the people love him. In the deep, large humanity of his soul had grown his moral and political principles, to which he clung with the fidelity of an honest nature, and which he defended with the strength of a vigorous mind.

But he had not grown great in any high school of statesmanship. He had, from the humblest beginnings, slowly and laboriously worked himself up, or rather he had gradually risen up without being aware of it, and suddenly he found himself in the foremost rank of the distinguished men of the land. In his youth and early manhood he had achieved no striking successes that might have imparted to him that overweening self-appreciation which so frequently leads self-made men to overestimate their faculties and to ignore the limits of their strength. He was not a learned man, but he had learned and meditated enough to feel how much there was still for him to learn. His marvelous success in his riper years left intact the inborn modesty of his nature. He was absolutely without pretension. His simplicity, which by its genuineness extorted respect and affection, was wonderfully persuasive, and sometimes deeply pathetic and strikingly brilliant.

His natural gifts were great; he possessed a clear and penetrating mind, but in forming his opinions on subjects of importance, he was so careful, conscientious and diffident, that he would always hear and probe what opponents had to say, before he became firmly satisfied of the justness of his own conclusions,—not as if he had been easily controlled and led by other men, for he had a will of his