recalling all of the circuit judges of the State, adding five new judges to the Supreme Court and imposing upon the judges of the latter court the performance of the duties which had theretofore been performed by circuit judges. A protest signed by Mr. Lincoln (then a member of the legislature) and others was presented to the legislature, condemning the action of the majority of that body by whose votes was passed the act in question, and giving the reasons for their disapprobation, among which were the following:

I. It violates the great principles of free government by subjecting the judiciary to the legislature.

2. It is a fatal blow at the independence of the judges and the constitutional term of their office. ...

5. It will give our courts a political and partisan character, thereby impairing public confidence in their decisions.

6. It will impair our standing with other states and the world.

This protest was presented to and entered upon the journal of the House of Representatives, February 26, 1841. Mr. Lincoln and five other members of the legislature had issued an address to the people of Illinois on the same subject on the 8th of the same month, in which this "recall of judges" was strongly condemned. When it is remembered that at the time of the passage of the legislation mentioned, the con

stitution of that State then in force left with the legislature entire control of the election of judges throughout the State, it is difficult to perceive any difference in principle between the interference with the independence of the judiciary which Mr. Lincoln condemned, and that which must result from a system which permits a recall of judges by popular vote.

F

OF

CHAPTER V

THE ORATOR

oratory, Justice David J. Brewer said:

Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture, please, thrill, inspire; but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action.

If this be true and the oratory of Lincoln be thus measured, few orators have left on record more substantial evidence of the possession of great oratorical power than he.

Daniel Webster's great reply to Hayne stands out boldly as the greatest of all the speeches of the greatest of all American orators, and closely in its wake follows his oration at the dedication of Bunker Hill Monument; and while their author delivered many great addresses, it is by these that he is chiefly remembered, for the average man has heard little of any other. Henry Clay is known to the world as an orator of extraordinary power, yet few there are who can name a single speech made by him during his long public service. But if the results of the forensic efforts of Webster and Clay be taken as the means of

determining the relative merit of the oratory of these renowned statesmen, who can doubt that to Henry Clay must be conceded the higher honor?

The reputation of Abraham Lincoln as an orator rests almost, if not entirely, in the estimation of his countrymen and the world, upon his Gettysburg Address and his two inaugural addresses. Yet if we measure his oratory by the results that grew out of it, it must be conceded that his greatest orations were the speech delivered at Cooper Union in New York City February 27, 1860, and those made during the debate with Stephen A. Douglas, in 1858. Of the latter speeches, he said, in a letter to Dr. A. G. Henry, November 19, 1858:

I am glad I made the race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone.

Prior to the time of the great debate no public man had taken the strong middle ground upon the slavery question upon which Mr. Lincoln planted himself in those speeches. The abolitionists advocated a resort to extreme measures against that institution in the slave states. They looked upon slavery as a violation of the law of God, as an evil with which no

compromise should be made, and contended that it should be abolished everywhere.

Mr. Lincoln took the bold and sound position that the National Government had no power to interfere with or control the subject of slavery in the states, but that it did possess the authority, under the Constitution, to prevent its extension into territory owned by the nation; and the arguments which he advanced were such as to convince the reason, control the judgment, and arouse to action the great mass of the people of the "free states."

As a result of those masterly addresses he became, not only the instrument by which the further spread of slavery was prevented, but also the medium for the accomplishment of the end which had long been the aim of the abolitionists, whose purpose he had in the great debate so strenuously opposed.

There is, however, another type of oratory which never fails to attract and hold the admiration of the listener; which plays upon the imagination and carries the multitude before it; which rises and falls like the waves of the ocean; whose beauty of diction charms and captivates the hearers by its pathos, or bears them aloft by the splendor of its well-rounded periods as a majestic ship is borne by the restless billows. To this class belong the funeral oration of Pericles; the oration of Demosthenes On the Crown;