Considering that, as we said before, this man was destined to preside over the most tremendous operations in the whole history of finance, it is especially instructive to see what was the state of his mind on economical subjects. He actually proposed to pass a usury law, having arrived, it appears, at the sage conviction that while to pay the current rent for the use of a house or the current fee for the services of a lawyer is perfectly proper, to pay the current price for money is to "allow a few individuals to levy a direct tax on the community." But this is an ordinary illusion. Abraham Lincoln's illusions went far beyond it. He actually proposed so to legislate that in cases of extreme necessity there might "always be found means to cheat the law, while in all other cases it would have its intended effect." He proposed in fact absurdity qualified by fraud, the established practice of which would, no doubt, have had a most excellent effect in teaching the citizens to reverence and the Courts to uphold the law. As President, when told that the finances were low, he asked whether the printing machine had given out, and he suggested, as a special temptation to capitalists, the issue of a class of bonds which should be exempt from seizure for debt. It may safely be said that the burden of the United States debt was ultimately increased fifty per cent through sheer ignorance of the simplest principles of economy and finance on the part of those by whom it was contracted. Lincoln's style, both as a speaker and a writer, ultimately became plain, terse, and with occasional faults of taste, caused by imperfect education, pure as well as effective. His Gettysburg address and some of his State Papers are admirable in their way. Saving one very flat expression, the address has no superior in literature. But it was impossible that the oratory of a rising politician, especially in the West, should be free from spread-eagleism. Scattered through these pages we find such gems as the following:-- "All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years!" ... "Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal (?) snows of the former, nor to the burning sun of the latter." ... "That we improve to the last, that we revered his name to the last, that during his long sleep we permitted no hostile foot to pass or desecrate his resting-place, shall be that which to learn the last trump shall awaken our Washington." Washington's mind, when he rises from his grave at the Last Day, will be immediately relieved by the information that no Britisher has ever trodden on his bones.