His fairness as a lawyer, and his integrity in politics, won his popular nickname of "Honest Abe." Perhaps honesty, in its fullest sense, was his central quality. He was always true to the truth as he saw it--true in thought and word and deed. One feels in his printed speeches that he is trying to see and to say things as they are. He had not the aid of the mystic's vision, in which the moral universe is revealed in such splendor that to accept and obey it is pure joy. But he saw and felt and practiced the homely obligations of honesty and kindness. His education came largely as at successive epochs there were disclosed to him new heights of moral significance in the life of the nation; and as fast as such disclosures came to him he set himself to obey them with absolute loyalty. His conscience was not of the self-contemplating and self-voicing kind. He was chary of words about duty. It has been alleged that the typical New Englander is afflicted with "a chronic inflammation of the moral sense." Such a malady does exist, though many a New Englander is bravely free from it, while it is not unknown in Alaska or Japan. From such an over-conscientious conscience, and from its incidents and its counterfeits, there is bred a redundancy of verbal moralising. That was not a foible of Lincoln. The sense of moral obligation underlies his weightier utterances, as the law of gravitation underlies scientific demonstrations,--not talked of, but assumed. Lincoln's political career gave high promise at the start. He seemed to have the qualities for success,--ambition, shrewdness in managing men, power as a speaker, integrity which won general confidence, ideals not too high above the crowd. Yet his success was so moderate that in contrasting himself with Senator Douglas, at the outset of their debate in 1858, he declared that, "With me the race of ambition has been a failure,--a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success." There were reasons for it: Douglas had given himself without reserve to his personal advancement, and Lincoln had been hampered by regard for other men and for larger ends. After one term in Congress as a Whig, 1847-8, he retired in deference to the fashion of "rotation" between localities. When roused to new activity by the anti-Nebraska campaign in 1854, he was the favorite candidate of his party for the senatorship; but seeing that the knot of men who held the balance of power were gravitating to the other side, he insisted on withdrawing in favor of Lyman Trumbull, as a stronger candidate, who accordingly won the day. Before the revival of the slavery issue, there had been nothing in the old-time Whig and Democratic contests to appeal to the deeper elements in Lincoln's nature, and personal ambition alone was not strong enough to push him to eminence. Though he could handle men skillfully, he had a distaste for the petty arts of the politician's trade. "Politics," he