He was
both of these things, but his great distinction is that he was also
something vastly more and better. He cannot be fully understood and
properly valued as a national hero without an implicit criticism of
those traditional convictions. Such a criticism he himself did not and
could not make. In case he had made it, he could never have achieved his
great political task and his great personal triumph. But other times
bring other needs. It is as desirable to-day that the criticism should
be made explicit as it was that Lincoln himself in his day should
preserve the innocence and integrity of a unique unconscious example.
CHAPTER V
I
THE CONTEMPORARY SITUATION AND ITS PROBLEMS
It is important to recognize that the anti-slavery agitation, the
secession of the South, and the Civil War were, after all, only an
episode in the course of American national development. The episode was
desperately serious. Like the acute illness of a strong man, it almost
killed its victim; and the crisis exposed certain weaknesses in our
political organism, in the absence of which the illness would never have
become acute.
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