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will and its power is easily solved.
Although he cared but little for simple facts, rules, and methods, he did care for the truth and right of principle.
In debate he courteously granted all the forms and non-essential things to his opponent.
Sometimes he yielded nine points out of ten.
The nine he brushed aside as husks or rubbish; but the tenth, being a question of substance, he clung to with all his might.
On the underlying principles of truth and justice his will was as firm as steel and as tenacious as iron.
It was as solid, real, and vital as an idea on which the world turns.
He scorned to support or adopt an untrue position, in proportion as his conscience prevented him from doing an unjust thing.
Ask him to sacrifice in the slightest degree his convictions of truth1--as he was asked to do when he made his “house-divided-against-itself speech” --and his soul would have exclaimed with indignant scorn, “The world perish first!”
Such was Lincoln's will.
Because on one line of questions — the non-essential — he was pliable, and on the other he was as immovable as the rocks, have arisen the contradictory notions prevalent regarding him. It only remains to say that he was inflexible and unbending in human transactions when it was
1 “Again, Mr. Lincoln seems to me too true and honest a man to have his eulogy written, and I have no taste for writing eulogies. I am sure that, if he were alive, he would feel that the exact truth regarding himself was far more worthy of himself and of his biographer than any flattering picture. I loved the man as he was, with his rugged features, his coarse, rebellious hair, his sad, dreamy eyes; and I love to see him, and I hope to describe him, as he was, and not otherwise.” --Robert Dale Owen, January 22, 1867, Ms.
The Herndon's Lincoln Pubishing Company, Springfield, Ill., 1888.
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