In the midst of this half-organized civilization Abraham Lincoln listened to the slowly swelling voices of conflict that came to him in his Illinois village from the Eastern and Southern States. The great scattered West longed for means of transportation. Railroads, canals, steamboats! They meant wealth and power to the pioneers and the shrieking speculators. The Whigs under Henry Clay promised to raise such a national revenue through a high protective tariff that a mighty surplus of money could be divided among the States to carry on internal improvements. Lincoln was a Whig. He was for a high tariff and internal improvements. Had he not personally piloted a steamboat from Cincinnati between the crooked and overgrown banks of the Sangamon River, and had not the imagination of that country taken fire as the vessel reached Springfield? Railroads, canals, steamboats! And no recognition yet of the issue of disunion that was to shake the continent and drench it with blood. After the return from the Black Hawk war Lincoln offered himself as a candidate for the Legislature. His handbill, addressed to the voters, dealt mainly with river navigation, railroads and usury. “I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life,” he wrote. “I have no wealthy or popular relatives or friends to recommend me.” Lincoln knew that public. He made his first speech in “a mixed jeans coat, claw-hammer style, short in the sleeves and bob-tail; flax and tow-linen pantaloons, and a straw hat.” First, he jumped from the platform, caught a fighting rowdy by the neck and trousers, hurled him twelve feet away, remounted the platform, threw down his hat, and made his historic entrance into American politics in these words: “Fellow citizens: I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the Legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank. I am in favor of the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles. If elected I shall be thankful; if not, it will be all the same.” There is the Lincoln we love--simple, genuine, direct! He seemed to feel to the day of his death that the public was not some distant abstraction, to be approached fearfully and crawlingly; but men like himself, with the same feelings and aspirations. It was because Lincoln hated shams and sneaks, and had the root of kindly honor in his nature, and because he saw, at the very bottom, all men more or less the same, that he reached the average American heart as no one has reached it before or since. He was humble enough--and humility is an inevitable result of moral and spiritual intelligence--to believe that the honesty he felt in himself stirred an equal honesty in others about him. He was defeated in the election, but that was the only time the people rejected him.