He could never
have become a national leader by the ordinary road of insistent and
clamorous self-assertion. Had he not been restored to public life by
the crisis, he would have remained in all probability a comparatively
obscure and a wholly under-valued man. But the political ferment of 1856
and the threat of ruin overhanging the American Union pushed him again
on to the political highway; and once there, his years of intellectual
discipline enabled him to play a leading and a decisive part. His
personality obtained momentum, direction, and increasing dignity from
its identification with great issues and events. He became the
individual instrument whereby an essential and salutary national purpose
was fulfilled; and the instrument was admirably effective, precisely
because it had been silently and unconsciously tempered and formed for
high achievement. Issue as he was of a society in which the cheap tool,
whether mechanical or personal, was the immediately successful tool, he
had none the less labored long in the making of a consummate individual
instrument.
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