TWO LEADERS OF MEN.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume L, Issue 12186, 30 March 1909, Page 3

TWO LEADERS OF MEN.

CENTENARY OF THE BIRTHS OF

DARWIN AND LINCOLN

("Daily Mail.")

A hundred years ago a great Englishman and a great American were born into the world; 1809 was a wonder-year, but of the many great men whose births it saw none were greater than Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.

Darwin was born on • February 12, 1809, at Shrewsbury; Lincoln saw the light on the same day in Hardin, Kentucky. Darwin's father was a Fellow of the Royal Society; Lincoln's father was a Western pioneer. The Englishman was educated at Shrewsbury School, at Edinburgh, and at Cambridge. The American had the little education that fell to him in a backwoods log-cabin school.

Darwin was a duffer at school. His intelligence was below the average. He was bored when he went to Edinburgh to study medicine. He had to exert himself to the utmost to gain his degree at Cambridge. At Cambridge, however, he became closely acquainted with Professor Hc'nslow, the botanist, and, through his influence, Darwin was appointed naturalist on the Beagle, which for four years was engaged on a surveying expedition in the waters of South America.

This was the beginning of Darwin's career. He began to collect facts, and he acquired enthusiasm for his life's work. His Beagle experiences formed the basis of the "Journal of a Naturalist," published in 1836. In 1838 he read Malthus' "Principles of Population," and was incited to a long, persistent, and tireless collation of facts that culminated after twenty-one years in the publication of the immortal " Origin of Species." EVOLUTION. The doctrine of evolution was denounced roundly by orthodox teachers, and a bitter controversy followed, the most memorable incident of which was tho duel between Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce in 1860. With certain variations, Darwin's conclusions are now almost universally accepted. They have given man a new view of the life of the earth. They have provided him with a new method of reasoning. " The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication" was published in 1868. "The Descent of Man" (perhaps the most popular of Darwin's works) in 1871, and "Action of Worms" in 1881.

Darwin married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, in 1839, and for forty years he lived at Down, in Kent." It is an interesting commentary on the national value of private fortunes that all through his life he had exceedingly bad health, and that it is certain that his great work could never have been done but for the income he inherited from his father.

Darwin died on April 19, ISS2, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Patience and. enthusiasm, coupled with favourable circumstances, made the career of Charles Darwin possible. Abraham Lincoln had equal patience and equal enthusiasm, but he had to conquer circumstances. When he was a young boy he was working on a farm. At nineteen he was a hand on a Mississippi cargo-boat, at twenty-one an assistant in a country store at New Salem, Illinois. a. •■

PRESIDENT'S START

He started a store and failed, became a village postmaster, and studied law, and when lie was twenty-five was elected to the local legislature. His fame as a speaker grew, and he became a politician. He entered the United States Congress in 1846, and it is a notable fact that his law business had increased sufficiently to have largely withdrawn his interest from politics when the whole question of slavery was reopened by Stephen Douglas in 1854. Lincoln was not in those days an out-and-out abolitionist. With the great majority of the people of the Northern States he Avas prepared to tolerate slavery in the South, but was bitterly opposed to its extension. Douglas proposed that slavery should be allowed in the Territories, and this was the beginning of the end.

The Republican party was organised in 1856 to prevent the spread of slavery. Lincoln was elected President in 186*0, and in 1861 South Carolina and the six Gulf States seceded from the Union, the war beginning on April 12. It should never be forgotten that, while Lincoln hated slavery, he stood always and above all for the Union, mid that the war was primarily fought to preserve the Union. Slavery ,was abolished in 1862, Lincoln was re-elected in November of the same year, and assassinated by Wilkes Booth on April 15, 1865. He was only fifty-six, but he had saved a nation. AN APPRECIATION. For an appreciation of the greatest statesman yet produced by the United States we quote the following from a remarkable article in this month's "Century Magazine" by Richard Watson Gilder:— Without the aid of any teacher, lie early learned to be moderate and reasonable in statement, so that on the part even of the obscure young politii cian there is a complete absence of that. kind of public speech which is described in a passage he loved to quote, where it is said of the orator that "he mounted the rostrum, threw back his head, shined his eyes, and left the consequences to God*." Lincoln's relish for a phrase like this recalls his extraordinary sense of humour. Probably no great historical figure in the realm of action ever had Lincoln's intense humourotssness, combined with so keen and racy a wit. Lincoln the Leader. . . had the lofty qualities of spiritual insight, of moral conviction, of solemn resolution, of undying courage, of complete devo tion, and of faith and hope unfailing He saw deeply, he felt intensely, he spoke at tunes with the voice of a poet-prophet. Fate—or is it some world spirit of comedy?-plays strange pranks with human affairs now and then, and nothing more singular ever happened in history, or was invented in romance, than the giving of imperial powers the destiny of a race, the leadership of a nation, the keys of life and deatn, to a sad-eyed, laughter-loviii"-story-telhng, shrewd, unlettered, great-hearted frontiersman—tho one great humourist among the-rulers of the earth. Leader, always he was, from the day when he, a youth, commanded a grotesque company of motleys in an Indian frontier campaign, to'the time when at Washington he led public opinion in a field as wide as the world controlled the movements of fleets and armies, and held in his strong hands the lives of hundreds of thousands of ' men. . ~

While often yielding to the dictates oi his pitying heart in individual cases and showing constantly almost abnormal patience, those who mistook his

charity for weakness were liable jt(jy ri . sudden enlightenment. . . . .■ >-

And here is the wonder: this merciful man, daily saving the lives of deserters so as not to increase a melancholy list of widows and orphans; this tender-souled, agonising, consecrated leader, looking out upon armies encamped and a suffering people, was as stern as fa to in demanding that buttle should be made, and war, with all its horrors, resolutely continued, till righb should be accomplished and eternal justice done.