Page:The parallel between the English and American civil wars.djvu/37

CIVIL WARS pass. As he passed, someone said, "He is a common looking fellow." In his dream Lincoln turned -to the critic and answered, "Friend, the Lord prefers common looking people; that is why he made so many of them." Lincoln always felt that he was one of the many and sympathised with the many, not with the few. His definition of a free government was one "where every man has a right to be equal with every other man."

Cromwell had all the advantages in the way of education that the time could supply a grammar school, a university, the Inns of Court (though his biographers tell us that he did not carry much away from his university except a little Latin and a taste for athletic exercises). Lincoln was self-educated, and reared in hardships. When a journalist asked him for facts about his early life, he said, "It can all be condensed in a single sentence, and that sentence you will find in Gray's Elegy—'The short and simple annals of the poor .' " But when one compares the 29