cabinet free to conduct their respective branches of the public service in their own way and to reap for themselves whatever fame their success brought them. He was ignorant of the details of their duties and did not try to acquire a knowledge of them, trusting entirely to their judgment and experience. He had no taste for desk work, and with his remarkable memory he was able to carry the Presidency of the United States in his hat.

"Money," Lincoln cried to some bankers. "I don't know anything about money. I never had enough of my own to fret me, and I have no opinion about it anyway. Go see Chase." The Secretary of the Treasury was as innocent as he of finance in the beginning of the administration, but with a high order of intelligence he had built up a system which brought in the three billions required for the expenses of the army and enough more to carry on the rest of the public work. It stands in history as a great achievement and wholly to his credit. Lincoln had the sound common sense not to waste his time in meddling with the work which he appointed another to do and who gave all his thought and strength to the task.

Unfortunately Chase's extraordinary abilities were impaired by a childish vanity and a peevish temper. He was a poor chooser of men, and whenever the

President saw fit to revise or interfere with his appointments, he took offence. Resignation was his favorite way of showing resentment, and Lincoln coaxed him out of several such fits of ill humor.

"I went directly up to him with his resignation in my hand," he recalled, in describing one experience of this kind when he had driven out to his Secretary's house, "and putting my arm around his neck, said to him, 'Chase, here is a paper with which I wish to have nothing to do. Take it back and be reasonable;' I had to plead with him a long time."

In his restless ambition to be President and in his contempt for Lincoln's qualifications for the place, Chase finally permitted himself to be a candidate against his chief. It was at a time when Lincoln was pursued by opponents, and the outlook for his reëlection was dark. Yet he patiently bore with this opposition in his own official household.

Chase himself came to see the false position which he was occupying and offered to resign. Lincoln answered that he had ignored the entire matter as far as he could. He had refused to read the circulars issued in behalf of the Secretary's candidacy and had not encouraged any one to discuss the subject in his hearing. He concluded by declining to accept his resignation.

"Whether you shall remain at the head of the Treasury Department is a question," the President added in fine temper, "which I shall not allow myself to consider from any standpoint other than my judgment of the public service, and in that view I do not perceive occasion for change."

Long after the movement for Chase's nomination had perished in its absurdity and Lincoln himself was nominated again, the Secretary once more lost his patience with the President and resigned. A grave financial crisis was upon the country, and it was generally a time of gloom for the Union. Lincoln, however, had the courage to face the inevitable, and with a promptness which took Chase by surprise he accepted the resignation on the ground that the differences between them had become so embarrassing that it was best they should part. "I had found a good deal of embarrassment from him," the retiring Secretary in his unfortunate lack of humor confided to his diary, "but what he had found from me I cannot imagine."

Lincoln, on the other hand, ungrudgingly said, "Of all the great men I have known, Chase is equal to about one and a half of the best of them."

The Chief-justiceship of the United States soon became vacant. With a magnanimity rarely equaled, Lincoln conferred on Chase this highest honor in a

President's gift. There is genuine pathos in this entry which the ex-Secretary made in his diary at a time when Lincoln, ignoring their unhappy estrangement, had determined to crown his great services with a splendid prize, "I feel that I do not know him."

Others whose good fortune it was to sit at the cabinet table of Lincoln were more happily gifted by nature to appreciate the homely yet lofty nature which swayed their counsels by its moral force. Seward pronounced it a character "made and moulded by Divine Power to save a nation," and Stanton beheld in his chief "the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen."

LINCOLN AND HIS GENERALS

All the great soldiers destined to reap the harvest of glory, in obscurity when the war began. - Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Thomas unknown men in 1861. — The advantage of the Confederacy in its military leaders. Lincoln's trials with McClellan and the earlier commanders. - His remarkable letter to Hooker, January 26, 1863. How he applied his gift of common sense to the art of war.-Some of his homely words of wisdom regarding strategy. No meddlesome spirit. - Standing by Grant when the general was a stranger and friendless. -“I can't spare this man; he fights."— His faith in him. "You were right and I was wrong." — Grant, General-inchief in the spring of 1864. — Grant and Sherman's estimates of Lincoln. His model relations with his generals. — His great achievement in maintaining the civil power supreme, and himself, the elected chief of the people, superior to military heroes.

THE great captains destined to lead the armies of the Union to victory were unknown men when the war began.

Grant had resigned his captaincy in the regular army and was a clerk in his father's leather store at Galena, Illinois, at a salary of fifty dollars a month. His duties were to keep books and buy hides from the farmers' wagons. He was thirty-nine and his life a failure, although he had shown in the Mexican campaign that he was a good hand at the trade of war.