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It is the ballot which is the stimulus to improvement, which fires the heart of youthful ambition, which stimulates honorable aspiration, which penetrates the thick shades of the forest, and takes the poor rail-splitter by the hand and points him to the shining height of human achievement, or which goes into the log hut of the tailor boy and opens to him the avenue of the presidential mansion."
They were themselves for the most part children of the people; and the son of the artisan or peasant rose to the mitre and the triple crown, just as nowadays the rail-splitter and the tailor become Presidents of the Republic of the West.
This rail-splitter, this boy who passed his ungainly youth in the dire poverty of the poorest of the frontier folk, whose rise was by weary and painful labor, lived to lead his people through the burning flames of a struggle from which the nation emerged, purified as by fire, born anew to a loftier life.
Lincoln was himself, like Garfield, a self-made man, who had risen from the very same pioneer labourer class; a wood-cutter and rail-splitter in the backwoods of Illinois, he had become a common boatman on the Mississippi, and had there improved his mind by reading eagerly in all his spare moments.
The nomination, so curiously made, was received with anything but enthusiasm by the country at large. "Honest Abe, the Rail-Splitter," might appeal to some, but there was a general doubt whether, after all, rail-splitting, however honorable in itself, was the best training for a President.
There on a bench, with my back to the wall and my feet dangling six inches from the floor, I listened to a lecture about a "rail-splitter." It took me many years to find out what a rail-splitter was; but the rail-splitter's name was Lincoln, and he became my first hero.
We ask ourselves anxiously if democracy has the unerring instinct to find such men to embody its wishes, or did it take him only for a talented rail-splitter an average man? But we have no certain answer to this anxious questioning.
They thought of him as coming from that stratum of clay that could be molded into a rail-splitter and, when the need arose, remodeled into the nation's leader. And quickly and unexpectedly, Sergeant York was destined to show by two other deeds, prompted by an inborn eminence, that the esteem was not misplaced.
This rail-splitter, this postmaster, this flat-boatman, whom he had not credited with a knowledge of the New Code, was talking Astronomy. And strange to say, Mr. Brice was learning. "Bob," said Mr. Lincoln, "can you elucidate the problem of the three bodies?" To Stephen's surprise, Mr. Hill elucidated. The talk then fell upon novels and stories, a few of which Mr. Lincoln seemed to have read.
Lincoln was in comparison obscure; his fame rested mainly on his achievements as a popular debater; he was wholly unversed in executive work and almost equally so in legislation; highly esteemed in his own State, but little known beyond its borders. He had been proposed for the Presidency only a week before in the State convention, with great hurrahing for "the rail-splitter," "honest old Abe."
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