Chapter 30

Considering that, as we said before, this man was destined to preside over the most tremendous operations in the whole history of finance, it is especially instructive to see what was the state of his mind on economical subjects. He actually proposed to pass a usury law, having arrived, it appears, at the sage conviction that while to pay the current rent for the use of a house or the current fee for the services of a lawyer is perfectly proper, to pay the current price for money is to "allow a few individuals to levy a direct tax on the community." But this is an ordinary illusion. Abraham Lincoln's illusions went far beyond it. He actually proposed so to legislate that in cases of extreme necessity there might "always be found means to cheat the law, while in all other cases it would have its intended effect." He proposed in fact absurdity qualified by fraud, the established practice of which would, no doubt, have had a most excellent effect in teaching the citizens to reverence and the Courts to uphold the law. As President, when told that the finances were low, he asked whether the printing machine had given out, and he suggested, as a special temptation to capitalists, the issue of a class of bonds which should be exempt from seizure for debt. It may safely be said that the burden of the United States debt was ultimately increased fifty per cent through sheer ignorance of the simplest principles of economy and finance on the part of those by whom it was contracted.

Lincoln's style, both as a speaker and a writer, ultimately became plain, terse, and with occasional faults of taste, caused by imperfect education, pure as well as effective. His Gettysburg address and some of his State Papers are admirable in their way. Saving one very flat expression, the address has no superior in literature. But it was impossible that the oratory of a rising politician, especially in the West, should be free from spread-eagleism. Scattered through these pages we find such gems as the following:--

"All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years!" ... "Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal (?) snows of the former, nor to the burning sun of the latter." ... "That we improve to the last, that we revered his name to the last, that during his long sleep we permitted no hostile foot to pass or desecrate his resting-place, shall be that which to learn the last trump shall awaken our Washington." Washington's mind, when he rises from his grave at the Last Day, will be immediately relieved by the information that no Britisher has ever trodden on his bones.

In debate he was neither bitter nor personal in the bad sense, though he had a good deal of caustic humour and knew how to make an effective use of it.

Passing from State politics to those of the Union, and elected to Congress as a Whig, a party to which he had gradually found his way from his original position as a "nominal Jackson man," Mr. Lincoln stood forth in vigorous though discreet and temperate opposition to the Mexican War.

Some extra charges made by General Cass upon the Treasury for expenses in a public mission, afforded an opportunity for a hit at the great Democratic "war-horse." "I have introduced," said Lincoln, "General Cass's name here chiefly to show the wonderful physical capacity of the man. They show that he not only did the labour of several men at the same _time_, but that he often did it at several _places_, many hundred miles apart _at the same time_. And in eating, too, his capacities are shown to be quite as wonderful. From October, 1821, to May, 1822, he ate ten rations a day in Michigan, ten rations a day here in Washington, and nearly five dollars' worth a day besides, partly on the road between the two places. And then there is an important discovery in his example, the art of being paid for what one eats, instead of having to pay for it. Hereafter if any nice young man should owe a bill which he cannot pay in any other way, he can just board it out. Mr. Speaker, we have all heard of the animal standing in doubt between two stacks of hay, and starving to death. The like of that could never happen to General Cass. Place the stacks a thousand miles apart, he would stand stock still midway between them, and eat them both at once; and the green grass along the line would be apt to suffer some at the same time. By all means make him President, gentlemen. He will feed you bounteously, if--if there is any left after he has helped himself."

Great events were by this time beginning to loom on the political horizon. The Missouri Compromise was broken. Parties commenced slowly but surely to divide themselves into Pro-slavery and Anti-slavery. The "irrepressible conflict" was coming on, though none of the American politicians--not even the author of that famous phrase--distinctly recognised its advent. Lincoln seems to have been sincerely opposed to slavery, though he was not an Abolitionist. But he was evidently led more and more to take anti-slavery ground by his antagonism to Douglas, who occupied a middle position, and tried to gain at once the support of the South and that of the waverers at the North, by theoretically supporting the extension of slavery, yet practically excluding it from the territories by the doctrine of squatters' sovereignty. Lincoln had to be very wary in angling for the vote of the Abolitionists, who had recently been the objects of universal obloquy, and were still offensive to a large section of the Republican party. On one occasion, the opinions which he propounded by no means suited the Abolitionists, and "they required him to change them forthwith. _He thought it would be wise to do so considering the peculiar circumstances of his case_; but, before committing himself finally, he sought an understanding with Judge Logan. He told the judge what he was disposed to do, and said he would act upon the inclination if the judge would not regard it as treading on his toes. The judge said he was opposed to the doctrine proposed, but for the sake of the cause on hand he would cheerfully risk his toes. _And so the Abolitionists were accommodated._ Mr. Lincoln quietly made the pledge, and they voted for him." He came out, however, square enough, and in the very nick of time with his "house divided against itself" speech, which took the wind out of the sails of Seward with his "irrepressible conflict." Douglas, whom Lincoln regarded with intense personal rivalry, was tripped up by a string of astute interrogations, the answers to which hopelessly embroiled him with the South. Lincoln's campaign against Douglas for the Senatorship greatly and deservedly enhanced his reputation as a debater, and he became marked out as the Western candidate for the Republican nomination to the Presidency. A committee favourable to his claims sent to him to make a speech at New York. He arrived "in a sleek and shining suit of new black, covered with very apparent creases and wrinkles acquired by being packed too closely and too long in his little valise." Some of his supporters must have moralized on the strange apparition which their summons had raised. His speech, however, made before an immense audience at the Cooper Institute, was most successful. And as a display of constitutional logic it is a very good speech. It fails, as the speeches of these practical men one and all did fail, their "common sense" and "shrewdness" notwithstanding, in clear perception of the great facts that two totally different systems of society had been formed, one in the Slave States and the other in the Free, and that political institutions necessarily conform themselves to the social character of the people. Whether the Civil War could, by any men or means, have been arrested, it would be hard to say; but assuredly stump orators, even the very best of them, were not the men to avert it. At that great crisis no saviour appeared. On May 10th, in the eventful year 1860, the Republican State Convention of Illinois, by acclamation, and amidst great enthusiasm, nominated Lincoln for the Presidency. One who saw him receive the nomination says, "I then thought him one of the most diffident and most plagued of men I ever saw." We may depend upon it, however, that his diffidence of manner was accompanied by no reluctance of heart. The splendid prize which he had won had been the object of his passionate desire. In the midst of the proceedings the door of the wigwam opened, and Lincoln's kinsman, John Hanks, entered, with "two small triangular 'heart-rails,' surmounted by a banner with the inscription, 'Two rails from a lot made by Abraham Lincoln and John Hanks in the Sangamon bottom, in the year 1830'." The bearer of the rails, we are told, was met "with wild and tumultuous cheers," and "the whole scene was simply tempestuous and bewildering."

The Democrats, of course, did not share the delight. An old man, out of Egypt, (the southern end of Illinois) came up to Mr. Lincoln, and said. "So you're Abe Lincoln?" "That's my name, sir." "They say you're a self- made man." "Well, yes what there is of me is self-made." "Well, all I have got to say," observed the old Egyptian, after a careful survey of the statesman, "is, that it was a d--n bad job." This seems to be the germ of the smart reply to the remark that Andrew Johnson was a self- made man, "that relieves the Almighty of a very heavy responsibility."

The nomination of the State Convention of Illinois was accepted after a very close and exciting contest between Lincoln and Seward by the convention of the Republican party assembled at Chicago. The proceedings seem to have been disgraceful. A large delegation of roughs, we are told, headed by Tom Shyer, the pugilist, attended for Seward. The Lincoln party, on the other side, spent the whole night in mustering their "loose fellows," and at daylight the next morning packed the wigwam, so that the Seward men were unable to get in.

Another politician was there nominally as a candidate, but really only to sell himself for a seat in the Cabinet. When he claimed the fulfilment of the bond, Lincoln's conscience, or at least his regard for his own reputation, struggled hard. "All that I am in the world--the Presidency and all else--I owe to that opinion of me which the people express when they call me 'honest old Abe.' Now, what will they think of their honest Abe when he appoints this man to be his familiar adviser?" What they might have said with truth was that Abe was still honest but politics were not.

Widely different was the training undergone for the leadership of the people by the Pericles of the American Republic from that undergone by the Pericles of Athens, or by any group of statesmen before him, Greek, Roman, or European. In this point of view, Mr. Lamon's book is a most valuable addition to the library of political science. The advantages and the disadvantages of Lincoln's political education are manifest at a glance. He was sure to produce something strong, genuine, practical, and entirely in unison with the thoughts and feelings of a people which, like the Athenians in the days of Pericles, was to be led, not governed. On the other hand, it necessarily left the statesman without the special knowledge necessary for certain portions of his work, such as finance, which was detestably managed during Lincoln's Presidency, without the wisdom which flows from a knowledge of the political world and of the past, without elevation, and comprehensiveness of view. It was fortunate for Lincoln that the questions with which he had to deal, and with which his country and the world proclaim him to have dealt, on the whole, admirably well, though not in their magnitude and importance, were completely within his ken, and had been always present to his mind. Reconstruction would have made a heavier demand on the political science of Clary's Grove. But that task was reserved for other hands.

ALFREDUS REX FUNDATOR

A few weeks ago an Oxford College celebrated the thousandth anniversary of its foundation by King Alfred. [Footnote: We keep the common spelling, though AElfred is more correct. It is impossible, in deference to antiquarian preciseness, to change the spelling of all these names, which are now imbedded in the English classics.]

The college which claims this honour is commonly called University College, though its legal name is _Magna Aula Universitatis_. The name "University College" causes much perplexity to visitors. They are with difficulty taught by the friend who is lionizing them to distinguish it from the University. But the University of Oxford is a federation of colleges, of which University College is one, resembling in all respects the rest of the sisterhood, being, like them, under the federal authority of the University, retaining the same measure of college right, conducting the domestic instruction and discipline of its students through its own officers, but sending them to the lecture rooms of the University Professors for the higher teaching, and to the University examination rooms to be examined for their degrees. The college is an ample and venerable pile, with two towered gateways, each opening into a quadrangle, its front stretching along the High Street, on the side opposite St. Mary's Church. The darkness of the stone seems to bespeak immemorial antiquity, but the style, which is the later Gothic characteristic of Oxford, and symbolical of its history, shows that the buildings really belong to the time of the Stuarts. "That building must be very old, Sir," said an American visitor to the master of the college, pointing to its dark front. "Oh, no," was the master's reply, "the colour deceives you; that building is not more than two hundred years old." In invidious contrast to this mass, debased but imposing in its style, the pedantic mania for pure Gothic which marks the Neo-catholic reaction in Oxford, and which will perhaps hereafter be derided as we deride the classic mania of the last century, has led Mr. Gilbert Scott to erect a pure Gothic library. This building, moreover, has nothing in its form to bespeak its purpose, but resembles a chapel. Over the gateway of the larger quadrangle is a statue, in Roman costume, of James II.; one of the few memorials of the ejected tyrant, who in his career of reaction visited the college and had two rooms on the east side of the quadrangle fitted up for the performance of mass. Obadiah Walker, the master of the college, had turned Papist, and became one of the leaders of the reaction, in the overthrow of which he was involved, the fall of his master and the ruin of his party being announced to him by the boys singing at his window--"Ave Maria, old Obadiah." In the same quadrangle are the chambers of Shelley, and the room to which he was summoned by the assembled college authorities to receive, with his friend Hogg, sentence of expulsion for having circulated an atheistical treatise. In the ante-chapel is the florid monument of Sir William Jones. But the modern divinities of the college are the two great legal brothers, Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, whose colossal statues fraternally united are conspicuous in the library, whose portraits hang side by side in the hall, whose medallion busts greet you at the entrance to the Common Room. Pass by these medallions, and look into the Common Room itself, with panelled walls, red curtains, polished mahogany table, and generally cozy aspect, whither after the dinner in hall the fellows of the college retire to sip their wine and taste such social happiness as the rule of celibacy permits. Over that ample fire-place, round the blaze of which the circle is drawn in the winter evenings, you will see the marble bust, carved by no mean hand, of an ancient king, and underneath it are the words _Alfredus Rex Fundator_.

Alas! both traditions--the tradition that Alfred founded the University of Oxford, and the tradition that he founded University College--are devoid of historical foundation. Universities did not exist in Alfred's days. They were developed centuries later out of the monastery schools. When Queen Elizabeth was on a visit to Cambridge, a scholar delivered before her an oration, in which he exalted the antiquity of his own university at the expense of that of the University of Oxford. The University of Oxford was roused to arms. In that uncritical age any antiquarian weapon which the fury of academical patriotism could supply was eagerly grasped, and the reputation of the great antiquary Camden is somewhat compromised with regard to an interpolation in Asser's Life of Alfred, which formed the chief documentary support of the Oxford case. The historic existence of both the English universities dawns in the reign of the scholar king, and the restorer of order and prosperity after the ravages of the conquest and the tyranny of Rufus--Henry I. In that reign the Abbot of Croyland, to gain money for the rebuilding of his abbey, set up a school where, we are told, Priscian's grammar, Aristotle's logic with the commentaries of Porphyry and Averroes, Cicero and Quintilian as masters of rhetoric, were taught after the manner of the school of Orleans. In the following reign a foreign professor, Vacarius, roused the jealousy of the English monarchy and baronage by teaching Roman law in the schools of Oxford. The thirteenth century, that marvellous and romantic age of mediaeval religion and character, mediaeval art, mediaeval philosophy, was also the palmy age of the universities. Then Oxford gloried in Groseteste, at once paragon and patron of learning, church reformer and champion of the national church against Roman aggression; in his learned and pious friend, Adam de Marisco; and in Roger Bacon, the pioneer and proto-martyr of physical science. Then, with Paris, she was the great seat of that school philosophy, wonderful in its subtlety as well as in its aridity, which, albeit it bore no fruit itself, trained the mind of Europe for more fruitful studies, and was the original product of mediaeval Christendom, though its forms of thought were taken from the deified Stagyrite, and it was clothed in the Latin language, though in a form of that language so much altered and debased from the classical as to become, in fact, a literary vernacular of the Middle Ages. Then her schools, her church porches, her very street corners, every spot where a professor could gather an audience, were thronged with the aspiring youth who had flocked, many of them begging their way out of the dark prison-house of feudalism, to what was then, in the absence of printing, the sole centre of intellectual light. Then Oxford, which in later times became from the clerical character of the headships and fellowships the great organ of reaction, was the great organ of progress, produced the political songs which embodied, with wonderful force, the principles of free government, and sent her students to fight under the banner of the university in the army of Simon de Montfort.

It was in the thirteenth century that University College was really founded. The founder was William of Durham, an English ecclesiastic who had studied in the University of Paris. The universities were, like the church, common to all the natives of Latin Christendom, that ecclesiastical and literary federation of the European States, which, afterwards broken up by the Reformation, is now in course of reconstruction through uniting influences of a new kind. William of Durham bequeathed to the University a fund for the maintenance of students in theology. The university purchased with the fund a house in which these students were maintained, and which was styled the Great Hall of the University, in contra-distinction to the multitude of little private halls or hospices in which students lived, generally under the superintendence of a graduate who was their teacher. The hall or college was under the visitorship of the University; but this visitorship being irksome, and a dispute having arisen in the early part of the last century whether it was to be exercised by the University at large, in convocation, or by the theological faculty only, the college set up a claim to be a royal foundation of the time of King Alfred, the reputed founder of the University, and thus exempt from any visitorship but that of the Crown. It was probably not very difficult to convince a Hanoverian court of law that the visitorship of an Oxford college ought to be transferred from the Jacobite university to the Crown; and so it came to pass that the Court of King's Bench solemnly ratified as a fact what historical criticism pronounces to be a baseless fable. The case in favour of William of Durham as the founder is so clear, that the antiquaries are ready to burst with righteous indignation, and one almost enjoys the intensity of their wrath.

The Great Hall of the University was not, when first founded, a perfect college. It was only a house for some eight or ten graduates in arts who were studying divinity. The first perfect college was founded by Walter de Merton, the Chancellor of Henry III., to whom is due the conception of uniting the anti-monastic pursuit of secular learning with monastic seclusion and discipline, for the benefit of that multitude of young students who had hitherto dwelt at large in the city under little or no control, and often showed, by their faction fights and other outrages, that they contained the quintessence of the nation's turbulence as well as of its intellectual activity and ambition. The quaint old quadrangle of Merton, called, nobody seems to know why, "Mob" Quad, may be regarded as the cradle of collegiate life in England, and indeed in Europe.

Still University College is the oldest foundation of learning now existing in England; and therefore it may be not inappropriately dedicated to the memory of the king who was the restorer of our intellectual life as well as the preserver of our religion and our institutions. Mr. Freeman, as the stern minister of fact, would, no doubt, cast down the bust of Alfred from the Common Room chimney-piece and set up that of William of Durham, if a likeness of him could be found, in its place. But it may be doubted whether William of Durham, if he were alive, would do the same.

Marcus Aurelius, Alfred and St. Louis, are the three examples of perfect virtue on a throne. But the virtue of St. Louis is deeply tainted with asceticism; and with the sublimated selfishness on which asceticism is founded, he sacrifices everything and everybody--sacrifices national interests, sacrifices the lives of the thousands of his subjects whom he drags with him in his chimerical crusades--to the good of his own soul. The Reflections of Marcus Aurelius will be read with ever increasing admiration by all who have learned to study character, and to read it in its connection with history. Alone in every sense, without guidance or support but that which he found in his own breast, the imperial Stoic struggled serenely, though hopelessly, against the powers of evil which were dragging heathen Rome to her inevitable doom. Alfred was a Christian hero, and in his Christianity he found the force which bore him, through calamity apparently hopeless, to victory and happiness.