I. SIMPLICITY AND SYMPATHY ESSENTIAL TO GENUINE CHARACTER
Greatness of mind, valued as worth while in historical characters, has always been characterized by simplicity and sympathy, especially as interested in children and in those without means for the needs of life. Lincoln said pityingly of the poor that the Lord surely loved them because he had made so many.
That Lincoln understood children and could talk to them is shown in his visit to Five Points Mission, then the most miserable spot in all the poverty-stricken sections of New York City. No one knows why he went there, alone and unannounced. Perhaps, knowing what was the lowest possible poverty in the frontier forests, he wanted to see what it was in the midst of the greatest wealth in America.
The manager of the Mission, seeing a stranger, in the rear of the house, who had been such an earnest listener to their exercises, asked him if he would like to speak a few words to the children.
We can hardly imagine his feelings as he arose to speak to those suffering little ones, so like his own hard childhood and yet subject to such different causes and conditions.
Feeling that he had used up his time, after speaking a few minutes, he stopped but they urged him to go on. Several times he ended his talk, but every time they cried out so persistently for him to go on that he spoke to them long over time.
No one knew who he was, but so impressive had been what he said that one of the teachers caught him at the door, begging to know his name. He replied simply, “Abraham Lincoln of Illinois.”
Adversity only made Lincoln stronger. In the midst of defeat he was at his best. In the midst of great moral success, in the profound trials of his country, his heart was mild and gentle as a child, and his eyes misty with supreme dreams of beauty and peace to lessen the suffering of humanity.
Once when Lincoln was speaking for Fremont, a brazen voice in the audience roared out above his own, “Is it true, Mr. Lincoln, that you came into the state barefoot and driving a yoke of oxen?”
The interruption had come in the midst of his strongest argument and was intended to throw him off of his subject.
His reply came back with a bound that it was true and he believed he could prove it by at least a dozen men in the audience more respectable than the speaker. Then he seemed inspired by the question into a vision of this country as the home of the free and the land of opportunity.
In a great burst of eloquence, that carried the people with him, he showed how oppression had injured the oppressor as much as the oppressed, even as slavery had injured the master as it did the slave.
“We will speak for freedom and against slavery,” he said, “as long as the Constitution of our country guarantees free speech, until everywhere on this wide land the sun shall shine, and the rain shall fall, and the wind shall blow upon no man who goes forth to unrequited toil.”
This was before he had spoken in New York, where his speech at the Cooper Institute awoke the people of the Eastern States to realize that an intellectual political giant had at last come out of the West.