who was especially active in "log-rolling" a bill for the removal of the seat of government from Vandalia to Springfield, at a virtual cost to the State of about six millions of dollars, which we were told would have purchased all the real estate in the town three times over. "Thus by log-rolling on the loud measure, by multiplying railroads, by terminating these roads at Alton, that Alton might become a great city in opposition to St. Louis; by distributing money to some of the counties to be wasted by the County Commissioners, and by giving the seat of government to Springfield--was the whole State bought up and bribed to approve the most senseless and disastrous policy which ever crippled the energies of a young country." We are told, and do not doubt, that Mr. Lincoln shared the popular delusion; but we are also told, and are equally sure, that "even if he had been unhappily afflicted with individual scruples of his own he would have deemed it but simple duty to obey the almost unanimous voice of his constituency." In other words, he would have deemed it his duty to pander to the popular madness by taking a part in financial swindling. Yet he and his principal confederates obtained afterwards high places of honour and trust. A historian of Illinois calls them "spared monuments of popular wrath, evincing how safe it is to be a politician, but how disastrous it may be to the country to keep along with the present fervour of the people." It is instructive as well as just to remember that all this time the man was strictly, nay sensitively, honourable in his private dealings, that he was regarded by his fellows as a paragon of probity, that his word was never questioned, that of personal corruption calumny itself, so far as we are aware, never dared to accuse him. Politics, it seems, may be a game apart, with rules of its own which supersede morality.