“Every foul bird comes abroad and every dirty reptile rises up. These add crime to confusion.

“Strong measures, deemed indispensable, but harsh at best, such men make worse by maladministration. Murders for old grudges, and murders for pelf, proceed under any cloak that will best cover for the occasion. These causes amply account for what has happened in Missouri.”

Early in ’64 the Committee of the New York Workingman’s Democratic Republican Association called on him with assurances and he meditated aloud for them, recalling race and draft riots:

“The most notable feature of a disturbance in your city last summer was the hanging of some working people by other working people. It should never be so.

“The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations and tongues and kindreds.

“Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”

Lincoln? did he gather

the feel of the American dream

and see its kindred over the earth?

“As labor is the common burden of our race,

so the effort of some to shift

their share of the burden

onto the shoulders of others

is the great durable curse of the race.”

“I hold,

if the Almighty had ever made a set of men

that should do all of the eating

and none of the work,

he would have made them

with mouths only, and no hands;

and if he had ever made another class,

that he had intended should do all the work

and none of the eating,

he would have made them

without mouths and all hands.”

“—the same spirit that says, ‘You toil and

work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No

matter in what shape it comes, whether

from the mouth of a king who seeks to

bestride the people of his own nation

and live by the fruit of their labor, or

from one race of men as an apology for

enslaving another race, it is the same

tyrannical principle.”

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not

be a master. This expresses my idea

of democracy. Whatever differs from this,

to the extent of the difference, is no de-

mocracy.”

“I never knew a man who wished to be him-

self a slave. Consider if you know any

good thing that no man desires for him-

self.”

“The sheep and the wolf

are not agreed upon a definition

of the word liberty.”

“The whole people of this nation

will ever do well

if well done by.”

“The plainest print cannot be read

through a gold eagle.”

“How does it feel to be President?” an

Illinois friend asked.

“Well, I’m like the man they rode out of

town on a rail. He said if it wasn’t for

the honor of it he would just as soon