Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. II.djvu/362

292 LIVES OF THE PRESIDENTS war and welcomed the advent of peace. Returning to Washington with his mind filled with plans for the restoration of peace and orderly government throughout the south, he seized the occasion of a serenade, on April 11, to deliver to the people who gathered in front of the executive mansion his last speech on public affairs, in which he discussed with unusual dignity and force the problems of recon struction, then crowding upon public consideration. As his second inaugural was the greatest of all his rhetorical compositions, so this brief political ad dress, which closed his public career, is unsurpassed among his speeches for clearness and wisdom, and for a certain tone of gentle but unmistakable authority, which shows to what a mastery of state craft he had attained. He congratulated the coun try upon the decisive victories of the last week; he expressly asserted that, although he had been present in the final operations, "no part of the honor, for plan or execution, was his"; and then, with equal boldness and discretion, announced the principles in accordance with which he should deal with the restoration of the states. He refusec to be provoked into controversy, which he held would be purely academic, over the question whether the insurrectionary states were in or out of the Union. "As appears to me," he said, "that question has not been, nor yet is, a practically material one, and any discussion of it, while it thus remains practically