No man ever learned by practical experience of the responsibilities of power to appreciate the solidity of these foundations more thoroughly than President Lincoln. A “Whig” by his early political affiliations and an active and successful politician in times of high party excitement, President Lincoln was not a partisan by temperament, and nothing is more certain than that he came during his practical war-dictatorship to very sound conclusions as to the essentially ephemeral character of the political organisation which had lifted him into that trying and dangerous post. He had no respect at all for professional “philanthropists,” and not much for loudly “philanthropic” politicians. The abolitionist agitators of the North instinctively disliked and distrusted him. The ablest of their number, Mr. Wendell Phillips, sneered at him as being not “honest exactly, but Kentucky honest.” It was no confidence in President Lincoln, but the political necessity of the moment, which compelled the extreme Anti-Democratic leaders of the Republican party to acquiesce in his renomination in November 1864, with a Democratic ex-Senator from the South, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, as his associate on the Presidential ticket. Of this fact President Lincoln himself was well aware. Nor was he blind to the popular and political significance of that Presidential election of 1864. In spite of all that could be done by an army of Federal office-holders larger than the armed force which Mr. Seward at the outset of the civil war had imagined would be adequate to “suppress the rebellion;” in spite of the combined influence of the “Republican” local governments in the Northern and Western States; in spite of military force brought to bear openly upon the polls in regions undisturbed by war; in spite of the overshadowing fact that the issues of the great civil war were still being fought out in the field, the Democratic party of the North and West confronted the Republican President at the polls in November 1864 with a popular vote of nearly two millions out of four millions cast in those sections of the Republic! The exact figures show that General M’Clellan, whose popularity with the Democratic party was based upon his fame as the creator of the Union army of the Potomac and upon his expressed loyalty to the principles of the Constitution as the Democratic party holds them, received, in November 1864, 1,802,237 votes in the North and West, or within a few thousands of the 1,866,452 votes which were cast for Mr. Lincoln himself in November 1860!