The fallacy that politics are primarily intellectual decisions upon stated issues, the going forth of the popular mind to decide between programs presented to it by circumstances, receives a brilliant refutation in the course of the powerful minority that was concentrating around the three great "Jacobins." The subjective side of politics, also the temperamental side, here found expression. Statecraft is an art; creative statesmen are like other artists. Just as the painter or the poet, seizing upon old subjects, uses them as outlets for his particular temper, his particular emotion, and as the temper, the emotion are what counts in his work, so with statesmen, with Lincoln on the one hand, with Chandler at the opposite extreme. The Jacobins stood first of all for the sudden reaction of bold fierce natures from a long political repression. They had fought their way to leadership as captains of an opposition. They were artists who had been denied an opportunity of expression. By a sudden turn of fortune, it had seemed to come within their grasp. Temperamentally they were fighters. Battle for them was an end in itself. The thought of Conquest sang to them like the morning stars. Had they been literary men, their favorite poetry would have been the sacking of Troy town. Furthermore, they were intensely provincial. Undoubted as was their courage, they had also the valor of ignorance. They had the provincial's disdain for the other side of the horizon, his unbounded confidence in his ability to whip all creation. Chandler, scornfully brushing aside a possible foreign war, typified their mood. And in quiet veto of all their hopes rose against them the apparently easy-going, the smiling, story-telling, unrevengeful, new man at the White House. It is not to be wondered that they spent the summer laboring to build up a party against him, that they turned eagerly to the new session of Congress, hoping to consolidate a faction opposed to Lincoln.