Lincoln, completely discouraged and thrown out of any possible council with a man thus against him, quit the case and sorrowfully returned to Illinois. And yet, only a few years later, in the great crisis of approaching disunion, Lincoln became President of the United States and he made Stanton his Secretary of War. Very soon Stanton learned to prize "the long-armed creature" as one of the noblest and greatest men in the world. No one of Lincoln's colleagues ever questioned his superior leadership as the supreme chief in a struggle profoundly affecting all civilization and human government. When we consider how Lincoln worked his way up, through such destitution of knowledge and means, in twenty-five years, from a five-dollar suit before a justice of the peace to a five-thousand-dollar fee before the Supreme Court of the United States, we know that such progress does not come about by accident nor political fortunes, but by sheer interest and work. V. THE MAN WHO COULD NOT LIVE FOR SELF ALONE Henry Cabot Lodge says, "Lincoln could have said with absolute truth, as Seneca's Pilot says, in Montaigne's paraphrase, 'Oh, Neptune, thou mayest save me if thou wilt; thou mayest sink me if thou wilt; but whatever may befall I shall hold my tiller true.'" The moral process of his life, in which the recorded incidents are only way-marks, is the only worthwhile interest for the American youth or for the newcomer to our shores. Lincoln's life-creed may be taken from a statement he has made of his personal duty. "I am not bound to win," he said, "but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to the light I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right. I must stand with him while he is right, and I must part with him when he is wrong." That this does not mean infallible individual judgment executed at any cost as imperial individual will may be inferred from the beginning of the statement, but it does mean the infallible integrity of honest conscience and character. Lincoln had a conscience that was like harmony in music, and he could not uphold a wrong thing any more than he could intentionally use a wrong figure and hope to solve correctly his problem. As an illustrating incident, one of his clients wanted to bring suit against a widow with six children for six hundred dollars. "Yes," said Lincoln, "there is no reasonable doubt that I can win this case for you; I can set the whole neighborhood at loggerheads; I can greatly distress a widow and her six fatherless children, and thereby gain six hundred dollars for you which I can see belongs to them with about as much right as to you, but I'll give you a little advice for nothing. Try some other way to get six hundred dollars." Like the rich man who went away so disturbed from the advice of Christ, this man went away sorrowing.