The Napoleon sketch had not been finished before Mr. McClure was urging me into a new job—not writing this time, but editing, editing according to his recipe. “Out with you—look, see, report.” Abraham Lincoln was the subject. My heart fell. “If you once get into American history,” I told myself, “you know well enough that will finish France. It will also finish your determination to solve the woman question and determine the nature of revolutions. They will go the way of the microscope and your search for God. Are you to spend your life running, now here, now there, never follow a path to its end?” Or was I taking my ambitions too seriously? It seemed probable. However, I was to have five thousand a year if I went along. There was no question in my mind but it was my duty to earn that money. Lincoln was one of Mr. McClure’s steady enthusiasms. I once saw him, in puzzled efforts to find the reason for the continued life of a certain great American magazine, going through the file from the Civil War on, solely to find out what attention had been given to Lincoln. “Not a Lincoln article in this volume, nor in this,” he cried. “It is not a great magazine, it has overlooked the most vital factor in our life since the Civil War, the influence of the life and character of Abraham Lincoln.” His insight told him that people never had had enough of Lincoln. Moreover, he believed that there was to be had for the seeking a large amount of “unpublished” reminiscences. It was on this conviction that he started me off. He was right about “unpublished” material. Lincoln had been dead only about thirty years, and hundreds of those who had known him in one connection or another were still living. His secretaries Nicolay and Hay had finished their great documentary life of their chief. They should have personal material not in their volumes. There were members of his Cabinet still living, members of Congress of his time, editors like Joseph Medill of the Chicago _Tribune_, Horace White of the Chicago _Tribune_ and later of the New York _Evening Post_, Colonel McClure of the Philadelphia _Inquirer_. There were scores of men in Illinois towns who had traveled the circuit with him, for whom he acted as counsel, scores of people who had as a youth heard the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and had been stirred to say, “Lincoln’s got it right.” They had followed him in his fight against the extension of slavery and later into the war to save the Union. There was indeed no point of his short trail from birth to death where living men and women had not known him as colleagues, friends, opponents, critics.