Of course there was a chance—so far as I could see, it was what Mussolini himself believed he could realize—to bring Italy to an even keel economically, by thrift, hard work, development of resources and by a system of legitimate colonization in the parts of the earth where he could obtain land, by treaty or by purchase.
And there was a third possibility to one at all familiar with the course of dictators in the world, particularly with the one with whom you instinctively compare Mussolini—Napoleon Bonaparte—that the day would come when he would overreach himself in a too magnificent attempt, an attempt beyond the forces of his country and so of himself, and he would finally go down as Napoleon went down.
Are Ethiopia and the alliance with Franco and the rebels of Spain to be to Mussolini what Spain and Russia were to Napoleon?
I was glad to breathe the air of the United States. It was still free, whatever our follies. There was at that moment no dictator in sight—no talk of one. But it was not Mussolini or the Corporate State which mattered to us: it was what was back of them. Why had parliamentary government broken down in Italy, the Italy of Garibaldi, of Cavour, Victor Emmanuel? Why had a dictator been able to replace it with a new form of government? Could this happen in the government of Washington and Lincoln? Those were the questions of importance to Americans. There was where there was something to learn.
19
LOOKING OVER THE COUNTRY
My chief consolation in what I looked on as the manhandling of democratic ideals and processes in all ranks of society, public and private, was Abraham Lincoln. In spite of his obvious limitations and mistakes he had won the biggest battle for freedom we have yet had to fight. He had done it by taking time to figure things out, by sticking to the conclusions he had reached so long as, and no longer than, they seemed to him sound, by squaring his conduct always with what he conceived to be just, moral principles. The more I knew of him, the better I liked him and the more strongly I felt we ought as a people to know about how he did things, not ask how he would solve a problem tormenting us, but how he would go to work to solve it.
Feeling as I did and do about him, I have kept him always on my workbench. There has never been a time since the War that I have not had a long or short piece of Lincoln work on hand. The result has been five books, big and little, and a continuous stream of articles, long and short.
The only fresh water in this Lincolnian stream was in a book I called “In the Footsteps of the Lincolns.” Beginning with the first of the family in this country—Samuel, who came in 1637—I traced them mile by mile from Hingham, Massachusetts, where Samuel started, down through Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley, the wilderness of Kentucky, southwestern Indiana, into Illinois, to the final resting place. I ran down the records that had been left behind, copied the inscriptions on gravestones, went over houses in which they had lived, looked up the families into which they had married, the friends they had made. When I finished my journey I felt that I had quite definitely and finally rescued the Lincolns from the ranks of poor white trash where political enemies had so loved to place them.
I have the satisfaction of knowing that this seven-generation pilgrimage of the Lincoln family has been added to the itineraries which enthusiastic students include in the cult of Lincoln now growing so strong in this country. I have never had an honor which pleased me more than a certificate from this group naming me Lincoln Pilgrim Number One.
My conviction that we needed in all our difficulties to familiarize ourselves with good models, sound laboratory practices led me to publish in 1932 a life of Owen D. Young. Mr. Young had impressed me as being just what I called him, “A New Type of Industrial Leader.” And how we needed one! I had first heard of him in connection with what was called the President’s Second Industrial Conference. After what I regarded as the cowardly retreat of the members of the President’s first conference Mr. Wilson had called a second with the same objective, a distinguished body of men, among them Owen D. Young.