to try to say how great my obligations are. Lest silence be misin-
terpreted -- not, however, by those to whom my debts are due -- let
me mention, first of all, Professor Leo Strauss of the University of
Chicago, who directed my graduate studies from 1944 to 1949 at
the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New
School for Social Research. He was and is my teacher, in a sense
now archaic but not less vital for being old. The only limits of
the scholar's profit have been his own capacity.

Professor Joseph Cropsey, also of the University of Chicago,
would have written a better book on these themes had I not pre-
empted them. I only add that the offices of friendship have not
been merely negative and that he has fulfilled them in overflow-
ing measure.

I owe much to the enthusiastic interest of Professors Allan
Bloom of the University of Chicago and Martin Diamond,
formerly of Chicago, now of Claremont Men's College. Frequent
discussions with these gentlemen during the year I was working
on this book in Chicago were invaluable in stimulating and clarify-
ing my thoughts.

My wife typed this, as she has all my manuscripts. Her tactful
suggestions, because of their unobtrusiveness, have probably had
a more pervasive influence than I am aware of. The foregoing,
however, have been the least of her contributions, although they
are not little. On the frontiers of scholarship, the work of the
pioneer wife continues, abating neither in hardship nor dignity.

Finally, I would speak of those to whom this book is dedicated.
It was many years after I first borrowed Lincoln books from the
Yale library for my father that I began to read them myself. The
exemplary method, if sometimes slow, is the surest. And if, after
my father, I became a Lincolnophile, so was I taught to love the
things that Lincoln loved by my mother.

Harry V. Jaffa

October 7, 1958

The Ohio State University

Columbus, Ohio

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