"If ever," said Abraham Lincoln, "American society and the United States Government are demoralized and overthrown, it will come from the voracious desire of office--this wriggle to live without toil, from which I am not free myself." These words ought to be written up in the largest characters in every schoolroom in the United States. The confession with which they conclude is as true as the rest. Mr. Lincoln, we are told, took no part in the promotion of local enterprises, railroads, schools, churches, asylums. The benefits he proposed for his fellow men were to be accomplished by political means alone "Politics were his world--a world filled with hopeful enchantments. Ordinarily he disliked to discuss any other subject." "In the office," says his partner, Mr. Herndon, "he sat down or spilt himself (_sic_) on his lounge, read aloud, told stories, talked politics--never science, art, literature, railroad gatherings, colleges, asylums, hospitals, commerce, education, progress--nothing that interested the world generally, except politics." "He seldom," says his present biographer, "took an active part in local or minor elections, or wasted his power to advance a friend. He did nothing out of mere gratitude, and forgot the devotion of his warmest partisans, as soon as the occasion for their services had passed. What they did for him was quietly appropriated as the reward of superior merit, calling for no return in kind." We are told that while he was "wriggling," he was in effect boarded and clothed for some years by his friend, Hon. W. Butler, at Springfield, and that, when in power, he refused to exercise his patronage in favour of his friend. On that occasion, his biographer tells us, that he considered his patronage a solemn trust. We give him credit for a conscientiousness above the ordinary level of his species on this as well as on other subjects. But his sense of the solemn character of his trust, though it prevented him from giving a petty place to the old friend who had helped him in the day of his need, did not prevent him, as President, from sometimes paying for support by a far more questionable use of the highest patronage in his gift. The fact is not that the man was by nature wanting in gratitude or in any kindly quality, on the contrary, he seems to have abounded in them all. But the excitement of the game was so intense that it swallowed up all other considerations and emotions. In a dead season of politics, his depression was extreme. "He said gloomily, despairingly, sadly, 'How hard, oh! how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived for it. This world is dead to hope, deaf to its own death-struggle.'" Possibly this is the way in which "wriggling" politicians generally put the case to themselves.