But, unlike them, he was not the intellectual and moral victim of his own purposes and ambitions; and unlike them, his life is a tribute to the sincerity and depth of his moral insight.

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.