I

PREFACE

HAVE tried to give to the reader the picture of the man who has so firm a hold on the imagination of his people. To the To the average American the name of Abraham Lincoln is one to be conjured up in all the exigencies of political life, and his social ideals are to be applied in all the intricacies of modern adjustment. It is impossible to understand this hero-worship without a knowledge of the social and economic forces of America, which created the problems that confronted Abraham Lincoln when he became President of the United States, and of the way in which his solution of these problems epitomized the dominant forces of the country. These forces had been existent from the moment of the country's birth to the day when the last free lands were opened. So exactly did he express the gaunt, crude, virile America of the free lands, that it is only now, when that day is over and America sees itself confronted by a complex society of propertied and unpropertied classes, that he is being glorified as the apostle of true democracy.

In writing this book, I have not tried to find an unopened letter or an unpublished anecdote of the hero. If this book has any value it is in the new historical perspective which it throws upon the man and his time. The social and industrial development of to-day shows Lincoln to be neither a demi-god

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nor merely a sentimental figure thrown out against a political background. He stands as the representative of a certain stage in American political history, and his importance lies in the fact that it was from this stage that the great present grew.

It is time his name conjured up a truer picture than that of a tall, gaunt man, looking out into space, in his hand the Emancipation Proclamation, and at his feet newly freed and grateful slaves. He is not "The Great Liberator" merely, he is part and parcel of his class, the small home-steader who claimed an equal opportunity in the virgin forests. As such he is not a hero, he is a people.

R. S.

May 1914.