V. SIMPLE INTERESTS THAT NEVER GROW OLD
Lincoln’s great sympathy for those who mourn is expressed in a letter of condolence to a friend whose father had just died.
“Dear Fanny:
“In this sad world of ours sorrow comes to all, and to the young it comes with bittered agony because it takes them unawares. The older have learned ever to expect it. You cannot now realize that you will ever feel happier. Is this not so? And yet, it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say, and you need only to believe it to feel better at once. The memory of your dear father, instead of an agony, will be a sad, sweet feeling in your heart of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.
“Your sincere friend,
A. Lincoln.”
His fatherly feeling toward childhood is shown in many stories of his younger son Tad.
Little Tad had all the impetuosity of energetic childhood. His father’s example of kindness once led him into conflict with the White House cook. Tad never saw a hungry-looking boy that he didn’t invite him in to have something to eat. This generosity was a light that could not be hid under a bushel. The number of hungry boys increased surprisingly. At last Peter, the cook, thought that Mrs. Lincoln must be told. He accordingly refused entrance to a hungry bunch that Tad brought in. Tad was very angry that his benevolence and his authority should be thus disputed. He flew upstairs to see his mother, but she was nowhere to be found. At this crisis he saw his father coming up the yard with Secretary Seward. They were discussing some important affairs of state, but that was insignificant in comparison with Tad’s grievance. He ran out to carry his complaint to the head of the nation.
“Father,” he cried, running up to the Executive in Chief of the United States, “Peter won’t let me feed these hungry boys. Two of them are boys of soldiers. Isn’t it our kitchen? I’m going to discharge Peter. He doesn’t obey orders.”
Secretary Seward was very much amused.
The President turned to him as if much perplexed.
“Seward,” he said, “advise with me. This case requires great diplomacy.”
Mr. Seward patted Tad on the head and said, “My boy, be careful that you don’t run the government into debt.”
Then Lincoln took his little boy’s hand in his, saying, “Tell Peter that you really have to obey the Bible which tells you to feed the hungry, and that he ought to be a better Christian.”
Tad went to Peter with the astonishing news that his father didn’t believe the White House cook was a Christian.
The religious problem of “feeding the hungry” won quickly over the economic problem of White House expenses. Childhood was not defeated in its sympathies, and, like every other moral question, it was solved in the spirit of social democracy.
Secretary Seward writes of this that in less than an hour they passed back through the yard on their way to a Cabinet meeting and about a dozen small boys were sitting on the kitchen steps having a state dinner at the expense of the government.