It would be out of place in these prefatory paragraphs, to attempt any skeleton picture of the momentous struggle. I believe that the story is told very completely in the lives which compose this group. The statesmen who controlled events during the war were a new group; they were not young men, neither were they unknown or untried in public affairs; but they were for the first time in control. In their younger days they had been under the shadow and predominance of the old school of statesmen, whose object had been to prevent, or at least to defer indefinitely, precisely that crisis which was now present. They themselves, on the other hand, had been strenuously advocating the policies which had at last brought that crisis into existence. But the election of Abraham Lincoln was their first, and as yet their only triumph. In all previous trials of strength they had been defeated. Their present success was like the bursting of a torrent through a dam. At the instant when they attained it they found themselves involved in a political swirl and clash of momentous difficulties. It was a tremendous test to which they were being subjected. The part which Lincoln played, at their head, I have endeavored to depict in his life. The manner in which he controlled without commanding, his rare combination of confidence in his own judgment with entire absence of self-assertion, his instinctive appreciation of the meaning and bearing of facts, his capacity to recognize the precise time until which action should be postponed and then to know that action must be taken, suggesting the idea of prescience, his long-suffering and tolerance towards impolitic, obstructive, or over-rash individuals, his marvelous gift of keeping in touch with the people, form a group of qualities which, united in the President of the United States at that mortal juncture, are as strong evidence as anything which this generation has seen to corroborate a faith in an overruling Providence. Conceive what might have happened if it had been some other of our presidents who had happened to have his term begin in 1861! Yet, after all the study that can be made of him, there are unexplainable elements in Lincoln's character which will leave him forever an enigma. If the world ever settles down to the acceptance of any definite, accurate picture of him, it will surely be a false picture. There must always be vague, indefinable uncertainties in any presentation of him which shall be truly made.