The Civil War was in truth Lincoln's war. Those modern pacifists
who claim him for their own are beside the mark. They will never
get over their illusions about Lincoln until they see, as all the
world is beginning to see, that his career has universal
significance because of its bearing on the universal modern
problem of democracy. It will not do ever to forget that he was
a man of the people, always playing the hand of the people, in
the limited social sense of that word, though playing it with
none of the heat usually met with in the statesmen of successful
democracy from Cleon to Robespierre, from Andrew Jackson to Lloyd
George. His gentleness does not remove Lincoln from that stern
category. Throughout his life, besides his passion for the Union,
besides his antipathy to slavery, there dwelt in his very heart
love of and faith in the plain people. We shall never see him in
true historic perspective until we conceive him as the instrument
of a vast social idea--the determination to make a government
based on the plain people successful in war.
He did not scruple to seize power when he thought the cause of
the people demanded it, and his enemies were prompt to accuse him
of holding to the doctrine that the end justified the means--a
hasty conclusion which will have to be reconsidered; what
concerns us more closely is the definite conviction that he felt
no sacrifice too great if it advanced the happiness of the
generality of mankind.
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