In that hard life, far removed from the
artificial aids and comforts of civilization, where all the wealth of
Croesus, had a man possessed it, would not have sufficed to purchase
relief from danger, or help in time of need, neighborliness became of
prime importance. A good neighbor doubled his safety and his resources,
a group of good neighbors increased his comfort and his prospects in a
ratio that grew like the cube root. Here was opportunity to practise
that virtue that Christ declared to be next to the love of God--the
fruitful injunction to "love thy neighbor as thyself."
Here, too, in communities far from the customary restraints of organized
law, the common native intelligence of the pioneer was brought face to
face with primary and practical questions of natural right. These men
not only understood but appreciated the American doctrine of
self-government. It was this understanding, this feeling, which taught
Lincoln to write: "When the white man governs himself, that is
self-government; but when he governs himself and also governs another
man, that is more than self-government--that is despotism"; and its
philosophic corollary: "He who would be no slave must consent to have no
slave."
Abraham Lincoln sprang from exceptional conditions--was in truth, in
the language of Lowell, a "new birth of our new soil.
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