In that great and distinctly English book, Robinson Crusoe, we find a young Englishman in consequence of a shipwreck thrown upon a deserted island in midocean. He is cut off from civilization and its resources and thrown upon his own ingenuity to carve out a living for himself which, to a degree at least, comes up to the experience which he has had while living in civilized society. A few tools and instruments which he saves from the wrecked ship are the only things to assist him in the building up of his future life, yet by industry, shrewdness, and perseverance he really succeeds in making that life not only tolerable, but to a degree comfortable. Possibly the trying circumstances in which young Robinson was placed whetted and sharpened his wits, strengthened his nerve, and inspired him with enough confidence to become equal to his difficult task; at all events, he succeeded, and the book narrating his experience, his trials, and his sufferings forms one of the most delightful and at the same time one of the most instructive books for young and old ever written. Its educational value can hardly be overestimated. It may be said that Robinson Crusoe is but a novel, and that his adventures and achievements all originated in the fertile mind of Daniel Defoe. But even if it was so, which is by no means proven, the feat of Defoe’s genius shows that a young man of strong character and full of resources, with an ideal placed before his mental eye, can find the means to raise himself to a higher level than he could have reached under ordinary circumstances and without the stimulating influence of personal hardships and pressing necessity.
It was so with Abraham Lincoln. The means of education which the wild West offered to him were of the most elementary kind, but his innate genius and energy knew how to make them serviceable to the high aim and to the ideals which he had proposed to himself. The loneliness of the primeval forests in which his childhood was passed fostered the tendency to reverie and thoughtfulness which formed one of the principal traits of his character. An American boy in the full meaning of the word he learned to love and appreciate that Union from which the West expected its development, and on which it depended as on the natural source of its future greatness. As if to prepare him for the great part he was to act in American history, he was made to see at an early day the wrongs and cruelties of slavery. His pure mind, which had been strengthened and refined by immediate contact with nature, felt the stain which soiled the American name and flag. As he went down the Mississippi river on a flatboat and became witness of a slave-auction, where family ties were brutally torn asunder, he vowed to himself to do his share as a man and citizen to wipe out that wrong against humanity. How nobly he redeemed that vow and how cruelly he suffered for redeeming it, we have told in the preceding pages, and the crown of immortality is his just reward.
If we should wish to compare the great martyr-president with any historical personage of preceding ages, it would be Henry the Fourth of France. While unquestionably there are many differences in their traits of character, they have nevertheless so many traits in common that the comparison is, in our opinion, a decidedly just one. Both were placed in leading positions at a time when their country was torn up by civil war. In the case of Henry the Fourth religion, or rather Protestantism, was the cause of the fratricidal strife; in the case of Abraham Lincoln it was negro slavery. Both were enlisted in the cause of humanity and progress. It is true, Henry the Fourth renounced Protestantism to win a crown, in the possession of which he alone could hope to render immortal service to the Protestant Church and the principle upon which it is founded, religious toleration; and by the promulgation of the Edict of Nantes he gloriously performed the historical task which Providence had allotted to him. Abraham Lincoln was willing to make any sacrifice for the maintenance of the American Union, for only as President of the United States and as conqueror of the rebellious South, could he hope to become the champion of the abolition of negro slavery. He was fortunate enough to live through the gigantic Civil War, and Clio, the Muse, of History, has entered in imperishable letters on the asbestos leaves of our national annals his immortal declaration of the emancipation of the black race. As two great reformers they will both live in history,—Henry the Fourth, as the embodiment of the principle of religious toleration, Lincoln as the evangelist of negro emancipation. It is a strange coincidence that these two great men were endowed by nature with so many analogous traits, but rarely found in other great men. Both had a keen relish for humor, fun, and wit, and indulged this taste under the most trying circumstances; both were lenient and forgiving to a fault; both displayed statesmanship and executive ability of a high order; and if Henry the Fourth has won greater laurels as a warrior, Lincoln has crowned his great life with the glory of being a great orator. Mankind has grown better by having produced these two men.
CHAPTER XXIII
ALEXANDER THE SECOND OF RUSSIA
