effective and fatal blow, the distinctive barrier, socially and politically, between North and South, and applying a remedy that determined the issues in the great Rebellion conflict. The controversy once rife over this matter is surely to-day in need of no further argument, any more than there is need to argue again the question, also once rife, as to the religious character of the great President and the precise complexion of his religious belief. In regard to the latter, there can, we think, be little room for contention, since though Lincoln was himself chary of giving expression in words to the character and extent of his faith in God, his life, we know, was a highly moral and righteous one, and conspicuously human in its tenderness. Though in his early career he may have been indifferent to religion, his personal and public life was later on marked by a deep sense not only of responsibility to a Higher Power than that of man, but of an abiding trust in a Divine Being, whose will and purposes he sought to obey and give effect to in the administration of his great office. Notable also was his reverent consecration of himself to the service of his fellow-man and to the heavy and exacting calls of the nation. The spirit in which he addressed himself to the accomplishment of the great task he assumed at Washington is manifest in his parting words, at Springfield, Ill., to his fellow citizens, on taking leave of them to engage in the arduous duties of the Presidency. "Friends," he said to them, "one who has never been placed in a like position can little understand my feelings at this hour, nor the oppressive sadness I feel at this parting. I go to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon Washington. Unless the great God who assisted him shall be with and aid me, I must fail; but if the same Omniscient mind and Almighty arm that directed and protected him shall guide and support me, I shall not fail, I shall succeed." Here, undoubtedly, we have the true Lincoln, and see the spirit of inner trust and dependence in which he wrought

and achieved his work. With this manifestation of the real man, can we doubt the secret of his meditative moods, amid all his jocularities and racy story-tellings, which endeared him to everyone and brought him into close and kindly touch with his kind?

Curious as well as interesting is it to trace in Lincoln's early years the makings of this extraordinary, self-made man. Nothing could well be more humble and obscure than the beginnings of his life, in cabin or camp, in the Kentucky scenes of his origin, or in the rough wilderness home in which he was "raised " in Indiana. In the latter State he early lost his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln; though in his shiftless father's second wife, the kindly and sensible Sally Johnston, he was fortunate to find a worthy substitute, to whom Honest Abe was ever greatly attached and of whom he grew to be gratefully and dutifully fond. At his parents' humble home, at Pigeon Creek, Abe spent his youth time, snatching what irregular and limited schooling he could obtain in the neighborhood, while contributing to his growth by an active life in the woods, catching coons and opossuras, interspersed by "doing chores" at home for his stepmother, or helping his father in cutting the family firewood or in felling timber for rustic cabins for the more well-to-do settler. At this period, Abe, who had meantime grown up a tall, lanky, ill-knit lad, of homely appearance and somewhat rough though kindly manners, was deemed by those who knew him as lazy and disinclined to work, but who delighted to spin yarns with his fellows when he was not lying prone under a shade tree or up in the cabinloft reading, ciphering or scribbling. About this time he began to develop gifts of native oratory, and when opportunity offered would take with avidity to political speech-making, enlivening his stump efforts with witty. jokes and amusing stories. His ambition now became earnest to prepare himself for the public arena, and in this creditable purpose he became more assiduous after

his trading expedition to New Orleans and when his father had immigrated to Illinois, where, however, he soon died. His son, Abraham, now settled near Salem, on the Sagamon river, some twenty miles or so northwest of Springfield. Here the future President became clerk in a store, captain of a militia company, which took part in what is known as the Black Hawk war, and after some brief experience as a surveyor he studied law and associated himself with a Mr Herndon in a legal partnership, meanwhile acting temporarily as village postmaster and seeking election to the Illinois State Legislature. To the latter, on a second candidature, young Lincoln was successful, and he now began to make a local reputation in politics, the while commending himself to his constituents as a staunch supporter of schemes for internal improvement and development.

In storekeeping, Lincoln hadn't the plodding, steadygoing habits that would enable him to succeed; while as a lawyer, though he was neither widely nor soundly read in jurisprudence, he won for himself a respectable and even an honored position. Moreover, he was too honest to accept fees from suitors whose cases he knew or suspected were not such as should commend them to a man of scrupulous conscience and moral judgment. In the Legislature, while he was loyal to the wants of his own section of the State, and strove to advance its interests, he seems at times to have been too inconsiderate of the State purse when demands were made upon it for railway projects and schemes for improved river navigation. He was however careful not to lend himself to party jobbery, still less to log-rolling schemes of questionable morality; while he became widely known for his manly, consistent probity and his sensitiveness to matters affecting his personal honor. As a speaker in and out of the Legislature, he interested his audiences by his effective utterances, set forth in plain, terse language, seasoned with humor and at times with a biting wit. His

manner of address was usually awkward, but was often impassioned and full of fire; while his great fund of aptly told stories enabled him always to draw large and delighted gatherings of people, whenever he was known or expected to appear on the stump.

It was at this, or rather at an earlier, period of his career that Lincoln had his unhappy experience of lovemaking, the first episode ending calamitously in the death of Ann Rutledge, a young lady to whom the now rising Western publicist and orator seems to have been tenderly attached. The shock of her early death, we are told, threw the devoted lover into transports of grief, which appears for a time to have threatened his reason.

With the assuagement of Time and preoccupation in his professional and political life, Lincoln, as we know, however, got over his early bereavement, and in 1842 married Mary Todd, of Lexington, Ky. This marriage, it is admitted, was not a happy one, owing partly to the lady's superior education and higher social position, though perhaps more truly to incompatibility of temper. Of the alliance, Lincoln, however, was never known to complain, obviously influenced in this respect by motives which did him honor; while he ever bore himself towards his wife as became a considerate and leal-hearted gentleman.

Great issues were now commencing to loom on the political horizon, when Lincoln was to take a prominent, and at length a commanding, position in their discussion and direction. To the consideration and handling of these issues the orator's phenomenal gifts and qualities of heart and brain were very helpful in enabling him to unravel the knots, and in leading him to divine the course the issues ought to take in the broadest interests of the nation. Before this era, the frontier "rail-splitter" had provisionally become a member of Congress; but it was not until the year 1854, four years after Clay's Missouri Compromise Bill had transferred the preponderance of power to the South, by opening the territories to

the extension of slavery and enforcing the FugitiveSlave Law, that Lincoln's political career actively and influentially began. It was at this juncture also that Judge Stephen A. Douglas, an Illinois senator, came into national prominence and influence. With the latter, "the little giant " as Douglas was popularly called, Lincoln had ere this crossed swords in heated debate, when in 1858 both men were in the running for the United States Senate, Lincoln on the Republican and anti-slavery side, and his opponent on the Democratic ticket, favoring the South and its eagerness for non-interference with its peculiar institution and opposing sectional limitation to the extension of slavery. By this time, the die was now about to be cast, the several political parties ranging themselves in opposing camps, and heralding the coming of the "irrepressible conflict," which for years was to sunder the nation and bring on the dire horrors of the War of the Rebellion. Meanwhile Lincoln's notable controversy with Douglas greatly enhanced the reputation the orator had gained as a debater, while it brought him favorably into notice as a likely candidate for the Republican nomination to the Presidency. His availability for the high post was further shown when an Illinois committee that had favored his claims despatched Lincoln to make a speech at New York and rouse the East by his discussion of the momentous questions of the time. The mission was Lincoln's opportunity, and grandly did he rise to the occasion, as we see in the memorable speech he delivered in Feb. 1860, before an immense and enthusiastic audience at the Cooper Institute, New York. The speech, which was remarkable for its earnestness and moral force, as well as for its astute use of constitutional logic, created a furore and spread the Western orator's fame throughout the East, where his name was already spoken of as a possible nominee for the chief office in the nation. The speech was followed by other effective utterances in New Eng