Mr. Bryce says, that all the world knows
the Americans to be a humorous people. [Footnote: Bryce, "American
Commonwealth," 2:286.] "They are," he has said, "as conspicuously the
purveyors of humor to the nineteenth century as the French were the
purveyors of wit to the eighteenth.... [This sense] is diffused among the
whole people; it colors their ordinary life and gives to their talk that
distinctively new flavor which a European palate enjoys." And he adds:
"Much of President Lincoln's popularity, and much also of the gift he
showed for restoring confidence to the North at the darkest moments of the
war, was due to the humorous way he used to turn things, conveying the
impression of not being himself uneasy, even when he was most so." Yet it
was no mask, it was instinctive.
On one of those days when the anxiety was keenest and the sky darkest a
delegation of prohibitionists came to him and insisted that the reason the
north did not win was because the soldiers drank so much whiskey and thus
brought the curse of the Lord down upon them.
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