Senatorial Character

easier to propitiate--but impracticable; not an idealist, but ideologist and doctrinary dreamer of a peace and freedom on earth which he put into no effective and satisfactory form; for ten thousand besides him recommended the Emancipation, which John Quincy Adams held justifiable as a war measure, and Lincoln proclaimed.

But though the greatness of rulers and social founders is in what they establish and bring to pass, yet in default of this rare achievement, which happens seldom in the course of ages to any man, a certain impracticability is in others in many exigencies a blessing to be thankful for, a virtue to applaud. In the collisions of interest with principle are plenty to trim, compromise, and compound as oligarchs or demagogues bid; but as the merit of some substances is the lack of ductility, so how oft we must lean on unmalleable men, whose back-bone is not supple as a universal joint, who will not "crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning," and who, in a noble