That this does not mean infallible individual judgment executed at any cost as imperial individual will may be inferred from the beginning of the statement, but it does mean the infallible integrity of honest conscience and character.
Lincoln had a conscience that was like harmony in music, and he could not uphold a wrong thing any more than he could intentionally use a wrong figure and hope to solve correctly his problem.
As an illustrating incident, one of his clients wanted to bring suit against a widow with six children for six hundred dollars.
“Yes,” said Lincoln, “there is no reasonable doubt that I can win this case for you; I can set the whole neighborhood at loggerheads; I can greatly distress a widow and her six fatherless children, and thereby gain six hundred dollars for you which I can see belongs to them with about as much right as to you, but I’ll give you a little advice for nothing. Try some other way to get six hundred dollars.”
Like the rich man who went away so disturbed from the advice of Christ, this man went away sorrowing.
In another instance Lincoln started in with a case believing his client innocent, then he reached the belief that the man was guilty. Turning to his associates in the case, he said, “Sweet, this man is guilty. You defend him. I can’t.” The large fee in the case was forfeited, but his self-respect, that nobility which carried him through many great dark hours, was saved.
Once, when out with his lawyer-companions, he climbed a tree, searching for a bird’s nest, out of which two fledgelings had fallen. His companions made sport of him for giving so much time and work to such worthless things, but he exclaimed with such genuine feeling as to silence them, “I could not have gone to sleep in peace if I had not restored those little birds to their mother.”
Lincoln liked to argue, and, to pass the time in a certain stage-coach ride, he was arguing that every act, no matter how kind, was always prompted by a selfish motive. About this time the stage passed a ditch in which a pig was stuck fast in the mud. Lincoln asked the driver to stop. He then jumped out and rescued the pig.
The passenger with whom Lincoln had been arguing thought that he now had proof for his own side of the case.