Webster had ever poisoned Lincoln. The moral ▾ reality of the problem was always alive and burning in him, and when he refused to go faster than a certain pace it was with a view to final victory and not to surrender. He knew that if no mistakes were made the natural course of events would stamp out the evil through the increasing power of the North. To the efforts of the South to offset this inevitable outcome by forcing slavery into those states and territories in which the majority wished to exclude it, he was deeply opposed, and that was to be the vital issue of the immediate future. "He grew because we watered him," said Wendell Phillips, the famous abolitionist orator, speaking one of the numberless calumnies of his sect against Lincoln. From the outbreak of the controversy to its end he was for final extinction of the evil, and he waited only for means. He knew what could be done in a land governed by popular opinion and what could not, and Phillips and his friends watered him only indirectly as they prepared the public.

In the winter of 1854-55 he was elected against his will to the Illinois legislature, but resigned, that there might be no doubt about his eligibility for the United States Senate. A little wave of reaction elected a Democrat in his place. When the legislature came to vote for Senator in February, Lincoln had 45 on the first ballot, Shields

41, Trumbull 5, with a few scattering. A few ballots showed that Lincoln could not be elected, he being supposed to be too much tainted with abolitionism, and then he induced his followers, against their will, to elect Trumbull, a Democrat, but known to be opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska policy of Senator Douglas.

In the convention held in 1856 by the newly born Republican party, which came into being in 1854 to concentrate the anti-slavery elements of the other organizations, John C. Fremont was nominated for President and William L. Dayton for Vice-President, Dayton receiving on the first ballot 259 votes to Lincoln's 110, a result which speaks much for the Illinois leader's general reputation before the Douglas debates attracted national attention.

At the head of the electoral ticket in the state he made some imperfectly reported but sufficiently pronounced speeches. An earlier one at Bloomingdale May 29, at a state convention of the "opponents of anti-Nebraska legislation" is well known through its effect on the hearers, and a rather good report of this " Lincoln's lost speech" has recently been made public. It was fervid and fearless. The contrast between his feelings and the Springfield atmosphere is shown by the fact that when Herndon and Lincoln tried to get up a mass-meeting to endorse the action of this convention, only one

other man attended. During the following campaign at Galena, in August, Lincoln said, "We do not want to dissolve the Union; you shall not." December 10, after the election, he said: "Our x government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the government practically just so much. Public opinion, on any subject, always has a 'central idea' from which all its minor thoughts radiate. That 'central idea' in our political public opinion at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be, the equality of men.' The late presidential election was a struggle by one party to discard that central idea and to substitute for it the opposite idea that slavery is right in the abstract.

To us it is left to know that the majority of the people have not yet declared for it, and to hope they never will. All of us who did not vote. for Mr. Buchanan, taken together, are a majority of 400,000. But in the late contest we were divided between Fremont and Fillmore. Can we not come together for the future?

Buchanan's election was immediately followed by a judicial decision which helped solidify the friends of freedom. This was the famous Dred Scott case, in which the Supreme Court of the United States decided that the state court of Missouri could determine for itself whether a slave from that state, who had lived in freedom

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elsewhere, could afterward be held in slavery by his master in Missouri, and that temporary residence in a free state did not give him freedom. In thus refusing to interfere, the federal court practically decided what Lincoln summed up fairly when he said that it was "singular that the courts would hold that a man never lost his right to his property that had been stolen from him, but that he instantly lost the right to himself if he was stolen." This case was argued for the slave at the first hearing by Montgomery Blair, afterward a member of Lincoln's cabinet, and at the second hearing by Blair and George Ticknor Curtis. So intense was the feeling about the whole subject at issue that the judges instead of ordinary opinions wrote elaborate essays on all branches of the slavery topic, × which did much to fan the already raging flames. Chief Justice Taney's majority opinion, going to the extreme of the pro-slavery position, soon after furnished Lincoln with many of his points of attack, including the principle, not before the court, that slavery could be excluded from a territory neither by Congress nor by a territorial legislature.

This obiter theory was accepted and defended by Douglas, whose most difficult task was to make it fit into his own doctrine of popular sovereignty. In a speech at Springfield, June

12, 1857, he covered the opinions of Taney and the other concurring judges with florid eulogy. He accepted the positions that a negro descended from slave parents could not be a citizen of the United States, and that the Missouri Compromise, being unconstitutional and void even before it was repealed by the Nebraska act, did not extinguish a master's right to his slave in the territory covered by it. He then proceeded: "While the right continues in full force under the guarantees of the Constitution, and cannot be divested or alienated by an act of Congress, it necessarily remains a barren and a worthless right, unless sustained, protected, and enforced by appropriate police regulations and local legislation, prescribing adequate remedies for its violation." As this legislation would depend on the will of the voters in the territory, Douglas pretended that he had saved the principle of popular sovereignty.

Lincoln answered this speech at Springfield, June 27, covering points which were fully fought out in the later debates, and saying in answer to Douglas's appeal to the strong race prejudice in Illinois, these well-known sentences: "I protest against the counterfeit logic which concludes that because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her