"It is very difficult for any one bred in the older communities of the country to appreciate the extreme humility of border life, the meagerness and meanness of its household appointments, and the paucity of its stimulants to mental growth and social development. The bed in which the elder Lincolns, and, on very cold nights, the little Lincolns, slept, during their first years in Indiana, was one whose rudeness will give a key to the kind of life which they lived there. The head and one side of the bedstead were formed by an angle of the cabin itself. The bed-post standing out into the room was a single crotch, cut from the forest. Laid upon this crotch were the ends of two hickory sticks, whose other extremities were morticed into the logs, the two sides of the cabin and the two rails embracing a quadrilateral space of the required dimensions. This was bridged by slats 'rived' from the forest log, and on the slats was laid a sack filled with dried leaves. This was, in reality, the bed of Thomas and Nancy Lincoln." *

In the midst of such primitve and unfavorable surroundings, the boy really began his mental and moral development: Not at any private school for boys, not at any academy, college, high school, or even the most elementary public school, but solely with the help of his mother, the few books that he could borrow in the neighborhood, and occasionally some transient teacher for a month or two.

Some still small voice within seemed to command him like Paul did Timothy of old:

"Stir the gift of God which is within thee."

What these gifts were and how he stirred them in his boyhood life should be of special interest.

* Holland, p. 28.

Somehow or other in some quarters Lincoln has been regarded as the accident of genius, as a mere backwoods boor, ignorant and unschooled, but providentially endowed in some miraculous way, with uncommon common sense, with almost divine wisdom, with a genius for logic and language that persuaded men against their will, and a godlike prescience.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The greatest gift with which nature endowed him, that was practically the parent of all others, was not a mere desire for knowledge, a thirst for truth, but a perfect passion for learning, for knowledge.

It would be unsafe to judge most men upon their own estimates. The bill of lading would surprisingly exceed the quality and quantity of goods delivered. Not so with Lincoln.

And as it is the purpose of this volume merely to interpret Lincoln from what he has said, from what he has done, I shall give here his own version of his "passion for knowledge."

After his delivery of the great Cooper Institute speech in New York, February 27, 1860, he made a short trip through New England, in which he aroused great public interest, both as to the man and his message.

A leading paper contained the following interview with him:

"Well, as to education, the newspapers are correct. I never went to school more than six months in my life. I can say this: that among my earliest recollections I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way that I could not understand. I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of an

evening with my father, and spending no small part of the night trying to make out what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings.

"I could not sleep, although I tried to, when I got on such a hunt for an idea until I had caught it; and when I thought I had got it I was not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over again, until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend. This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me; for I am never easy now, when I am handling a thought, until I have bounded it north and bounded it south and bounded it east and bounded it west." *

No simpler, stronger statement could be made of his paramount passion for knowledge, his self-reliant methods of research and reason upon his own resources.†

* Curtis, p. 59.

† Doctor E. C. Moore, formerly professor of education in Harvard University, in his treatise on "What is Education," at page 24 says: "Education is determined by what the student does. A single subject which has been pursued in such a way that he has learned to stand on his own feet, and use his own mind in the getting and solving of its problems provides a more real education than a whole college course in which one has merely endeavored to appropriate the thoughts of other men, or tried to become a thinker without thinking about anything which seemed to require thought."

CHAPTER III

LINCOLN'S PASSION FOR KNOWLEDGE

(CONTINUED)

What a

LINCOLN was his own schoolmaster in the rudiments of knowledge, in law, and in government. teacher! What a pupil! What results!

This master man gave us his method, and his formula of self-education in the interview just quoted. Later in a succeeding chapter, in his advice to a law student, he tells us to "work, work, work." No matter what the educational method may be, in its last analysis it will be found, as Euclid said: "There is no royal road to learning."

Let us examine Lincoln's own formula as to its elements, and as to where and how he applied them.

Now, where did Lincoln "hunt" for his ideas? What did he repeat over and over again and put in language "plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend," and where did he get the thoughts which he says he "bounded north and bounded south and bounded east and bounded west," as appeared in the New York interview cited in the last chapter?

He was as poor in number of books as he was rich in the nature of books. His library, chiefly borrowed, was composed of the Bible, Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," "Esop's Fables," DeFoe's "Robinson Crusoe,' Weems's "Life of Washington," a "History of the United States" and the dictionary.

And yet what a library for a liberal and efficient education-at least the foundation of an education.

What boy ever had a better set of text-books for learning and language, for conscience and character, than these?

These books he read and reread, studied and restudied, until he knew them from cover to cover. He literally devoured them and assimilated them into his mind, as he assimilated food into his body.

While working in the field at odd moments, or between errands in the home, or between customers in the store, whenever he had a leisure moment, the Bible, or Bunyan, or the dictionary was always at his elbow. In addition to these books he was a constant and regular reader of the best newspapers of the day. Herndon* says:

"He was a careful and patient reader of newspapers, the Sangamon Journal-published at Springfield— Louisville Journal, St. Louis Republican, and Cincinnati Gazette being usually within his reach."

Abe not only had the handicap of no schools in the neighborhood, no books in the home, but also the lack of interest, and even opposition, of the father to his employment in books rather than in the field.

As appears in Lincoln's written statement to Fell in the preceding chapter:

"He, the father, grew up literally without education. He never did more in the way of writing than bunglingly to write his own name." (His wife had taught him to do this.)

This illiteracy upon the part of the father exhibited itself in a strong opposition to the boy's education. The father's general shiftlessness and business inef

* Vol. I, p. 104.