Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/131

 Neither of them had, in working his way upward from a low estate, any resource to draw on but his own native ability and spirit. But here they were, in positions before the country in which their ambitions could, without any overleaping, aim at the highest honors of the Republic. One of them, Douglas, had risen by rapid but regular political advancement to a Senatorship of the United States, and had, by his contact with the great world, acquired, if not the true refinement, at least some of the outward polish of “good society.” His rise had been effected, perhaps, not altogether by blameless means, but at any rate mainly by the force of his own intellect and the exercise of his own energies. The other, Lincoln, had not been quite so successful in achieving official station, but he had won a singular influence over the minds of large numbers of people by the power of his own mind and the virtues of his own character—and this while the outward rusticity of his early life still clung to him, and was in a large sense a part of his being. Each one of them was truly a child of the people. Each had won his remarkable eminence because each had, in his way, by his own effort, deserved it. And these men now contended for the mastery by appealing to the intelligence and the patriotism of the people—the one, perhaps, largely by the arts of the demagogue, seeking to befog the popular understanding where he could not, to his advantage, honestly enlighten it; the other, perhaps, by candid truth-telling and grave appeals to conscience—but both by addressing themselves to the minds of the people, whose opinion, lawfully expressed, was by both recognized to be the only legitimate source of all power.

The only thing that troubled me in the admiring, reverential contemplation of this spectacle was not so much the thought that in these efforts to shape public opinion the arts of the demagogue and the appeal to prejudice or selfishness might