also thinking deeply upon other subjects besides law. There was but little religion of any kind in and about New Salem, or through all the prairie country, in those rude days. Such as there was would hardly stand any exhaustive analysis. Few men gave any especial care to matters of faith or doctrine. There were many more horse-races and wrestling-matches than Gospel gatherings. The exceptional preaching was of a nature little calculated to impress a mind like that of Abraham Lincoln. Moreover, there was a jarring of sects and creeds, here and there, as in other communities always, and out of this came vastly more of contention than Christianity. If what he saw around him were all there was of religion, it required less effort to reject than to accept it; but the searching mind of the young thinker compelled him to make some sort of personal inquiry. His first teachers were about as bad as could have been given him, and he was not yet prepared to penetrate the shallow reasoning of Volney and Tom Paine. He even tried to follow out their lines of thought in an elaborate manuscript, and when this was finished he read it to a little circle in the store of Mr. Samuel Hill. There were those present who thought well of it, but a son of Mr. Hill expressed his own opinion in the plain word "infamous," took the paper in his hand and thrust it into the fire. There was nearly enough of it for a small book, but it burned well and Lincoln very sensibly let it burn.

He did not know how closely he was following in the footsteps of the great majority of those who honestly seek for the Truth. Still less could he then foresee the day when he should himself kneel down and lead a whole nation in prayer and fasting and thanksgiving and confession of sin, and that in their darkest hour of trial he should rise before them to encourage them to trust in the very God whose existence he was now in callow fashion persuading himself to deny.

All true thinkers are necessarily "free thinkers" until they enter into some description of bonds to their own self-conceit

and surrender their freedom to that miserable taskmaster. Lincoln began as a free inquirer, and never fell in with the mob of bondmen, but went on learning more and more until the very end. That at such a time he exercised himself so deeply on such a subject is an invaluable index to the formative processes of his inner life.

The time at last arrived for his journey to the Capitol of the State, then at Vandalia, in the southern part of the long, huge area of Illinois. Thanks to Mr. Smoot's friendly loan, he was well prepared to go with proper dignity, and to make a presentable appearance among his fellow-legislators. He had but a hundred miles or so to travel, but that short journey carried him on into a new sphere of life and action.

CHAPTER XV.

IN THE LEGISLATURE.

Practical Politics-Lessons in Public Finance-Blowing Bubbles-A great Darkness-1834-36.

MR. LINCOLN had now attained a position which was full of promise. The power of binding men to him by ties of strong personal attachment had been born with him. The capacity for influencing and controlling them when assembled as citizens for the discussion of political questions had been developed in him remarkably and almost without his knowledge. He was now to study and acquire the art or trade of managing a drove of selfish politicians. The material for such a training was gathered for him in perfection at Vandalia. He found himself surrounded by narrow-minded, ignorant embodiments of party prejudice, local jealousy, self-seeking, and self-conceit. In such a mob he could not help becoming a man of some mark, but during the greater part of that first "session" of 1834-1835 he neither sought nor attained especial prominence. He was as yet a student of politics, not ready to be an active worker and still less a leader. Of many things he knew as much as did the majority of his fellow-legislators, and of some things he knew a great deal more, but he was slow to tell them so. Few of them, at all events, could equal him in telling a story with a keen point to it, and none surpassed him in personal height or in the peculiar heartiness of manner which made him so speedily at home amid his new surroundings.

At the beginning of his education as a political manager, he was also at the beginning of a long course of experimental instruction as to what could and what could not safely be done

with public credit. He was to be taught fundamental truths of finance concerning a State or a nation, that he might not, in after-days, come ignorantly and without experience to the discussion and arbitrary decision of precisely such questions, relating to a wider field than that of the very young and now half-crazy State of Illinois.

Lincoln believed in a general system of public improvements, and so did almost everybody else; but the common accord ceased at that point. Beyond it lay a tangled mass of problems as to methods of procuring money wherewith to improve, and right along with these came a chaos of discord and contention as to how and where it should be spent, and which of the outreaching, grasping local interests should first be served. The State was out of debt and its credit stood well in the money markets. It could readily borrow whatever it might need. It had sovereign power to create banks, and, through these, an unlimited capacity for the issue of paper money. The whole population was gambling in town-lots, lands, and almost every other kind of property.

Illinois was by no means alone in her gambling fever. A somewhat similar condition of affairs existed elsewhere, North, South, East, and West.

As for the Legislature, not a soul in Vandalia knew the first principles of finance or political economy. There had been as yet no teaching given to the New Salem member of a sort to open his eyes to the fragility of the bubbles he and his associates were about to inflate. All looked well, and nothing seemed requisite except the soapsuds of the State credit and the creative breath of the Legislature.

The speculative mania did not rise to fever-heat during that first winter, but some very fine bubbles were blown. A State bank was chartered, with a "capital" of a million and a half. A broken-down money-mill of a bank in the wretched village of Shawneetown, in the southern part of the State, was set running again by a law which declared that it had three hun

dred thousand dollars to run with. The State borrowed half a million of actual dollars, and began to spend them on the western end of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. Nothing was done for the Sangamon River, and that and other incomplete streams were compelled to postpone for a while, at least, their ambition of becoming "navigable." Their friends, however, were firmly determined that the State credit and statute law should yet supply them with deep, well-made channels and an abundance of river-water, and thus everybody living along the banks of them would be rich at once. Mr. Lincoln was assigned a place upon the Committee on Public Accounts and Expenditures. It was a good enough corner in which to study and acquire the information he stood most in need of, but he did not bring an ounce of practical preparation to the legislative work set before him. He toiled away at his task, nevertheless, and at the end of the session he returned to his New Salem home and his law-books.

grow

The year 1835 seemed to open brightly enough, but its coming weeks and months were bringing Lincoln deeper and sadder lessons than any which had yet been given him. He had already discovered in himself the germs of remarkable faculties. He had cultivated all industriously and with success, under the most adverse circumstances. There was in his ing soul yet one more power of whose very existence he was but dimly conscious. It was the power of suffering; the faculty of feeling inward pain more deeply, more keenly, than other men, and of keeping and carrying it longer. The related capacity for concealment did not come at the same time, but was to be developed later, when there should be greater need of it, that he might not fail in doing the duties whose needful performance should entail the suffering.

It is not known precisely when Ann Rutledge told her suitor that her heart was his, but early in 1835 it was publicly known that they were solemnly betrothed. Even then the scrupulous maiden waited for the return of the absent McNa