Lincoln's early life has interest and meaning only for those who are seeking to understand the pioneer political principles, fundamental in character and civilization, out of which could develop a mind and manhood equipped for the greatest and noblest of human tasks. To take his "backwoods" experiences and their comparatively uncouth incidents, as interesting merely because they happened to a man who became famous, is to miss every inspiration, value and meaning so important in building his way as man and statesman. To read the early incidents of Lincoln's life for the isolated interest of their being the queer, peculiar or pathetic biography of a notable character has little that is either inspiring or informing to a boy in the light of present experiences and methods of living. Indeed, many social episodes of pioneer customs are seemingly so trivial or coarse, in comparison, as to detract in respect from a boy's ideal of the historical Lincoln. [Illustration: The Birthplace of Abraham Lincoln--Hodgensville, Ky.] The pioneer frontier was the social infancy of a new meaning for civilization. Its lowly needs of humble equality were the first social interests of Lincoln, and the wonderful story of his life in that place and time, if told as merely historical happenings, incidentally noticeable only because they happened to Lincoln, becomes more and more frivolous and disesteeming in interest to boyhood, and to the general reader, as current social customs develop away beyond those times. This is why such strained efforts have been made to give the incidents of his social infancy a pathetic interest, or some other sympathetic appeal, where everything was so unromantic, industrious, simple, enjoyable and faithful to the earth. Those lowly years were sacred privacy to him. He knew there was nothing in them for a biographer, and he said so. His experience is valuable only in showing how it developed a man. True enough, the biographically uninteresting trivialities of his early years were not from him but from his environment. This is proven from the fact that two wider contrasting environments are hardly possible than those of Washington and Lincoln, and yet out of them came the same model character and supreme American. II. THE PROCESS OF LIFE FROM WITHIN Standard authorities have already fully recorded Lincoln's biography and its historical environment. There yet remains the far more difficult, delicate and consequential message from generation to generation, so much needed in patriotic appreciation, to interpret his rise from those vanished social origins, in order that there may be a just valuation of his life by American youth.