from the testimony of "the Fathers" on the general question of slavery, to present the single question he discusses. From the first line to the last-from his premise to his conclusion, he travels with swift, unerring directness which no logician ever excelled an argument complete and full, without the affectation of learning, and without the stiffness which usually accompanies dates and details. A single, easy, simple sentence of plain Anglo-Saxon words contains a chapter of history that, in some instances, has taken days of labor to verify and which must have cost the author months of investigation to acquire."

Lincoln, reading these lines, and remembering how not months but a lifetime of investigation and demonstration had furnished him with those facts,-can one not see the merry twinkle in his eye?

Following the Cooper Institute speech Lincoln made several speeches in the East, the report of it having caused te egraph demands without number. He visited his son Robert at Exeter, New Hampshire, where he was a student at Phillips Academy. He spoke at Providence, Concord, Hartford, Meriden, Connecticut, and Bridgeport, Connecticut. He wrote from Exeter, March 4th, 1860, to his wife:

"I have been unable to escape this toil. If I had foreseen it, I think I would not have come East at all. The speech at New York, being within my calculation before I started, went off passably well and gave me no trouble whatever. The difficulty was to make nine others before reading audiences who have already seen all my ideas in print."

This extract, reveals the melancholy side of Lincoln's nature. He could not see, or was not convinced, that his speeches were going to play an important part in making him President. But so it was, as the action of the delegates proved.

It was the Cooper Institute oration, the last composed political speech Lincoln ever made, that won the East to his support, and gave him the final ascendancy over Mr. Seward, his formidable rival in the convention. The man whom New York had allowed to go a lonely way to his lonely room after his speech, when next he stood in that city one year later, rode in a carriage drawn by four white horses and bowed to the shouting thousands lining the streets. He was the newly elected President of the United States.

Chapter XV

PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC

T

HE REPUBLICAN National Convention, which met in Chicago in May 1860, nominated Abraham Lin

coln for President of the United States. His principal opponents for the high office were Seward of New York, and Chase of Ohio. Lincoln was nominated on the third ballot. When the vote was announced the great Wigwam, which had been built to house the convention, became a whirlpool of political emotion, the outer edges of which spread to every loyal state in the Union. The humble rail splitter of Illinois had defeated the famous statesman of New York and the cultured Senator of Ohio, both of whom, as Lincoln himself said, had borne the labor and abuse of initial leadership in the new Party and were entitled to the honor more than he.

But the delegates who made up that great Convention of protest against oligarchy, had something else in their minds than honors earned and culture acquired. They came up from the country to Chicago, a vigorous, virile citizenry, men of the shop and the farm, the counter, the school and from the bloody plains of Kansas. To them the Wigwam became a holy shrine upon whose altar they were gathered to offer sacrifice to the Goddess of Liberty and Freedom. Seward's "Irrepressible Conflict," and his "Law higher than the Con

stitution," shone pale and dim beside Lincoln's flaming “A house divided against itself cannot stand." The declaration of Chase that, Constitution or no Constitution, the slaves should be set free, bold and chivalric as it was, lacked the conviction of Lincoln's sane worship of the Constitution and his declaration that that document formed the only wall against which the Nation could put its back in the coming struggle for existence. Not since the meeting of the Fathers in Independence Hall had men come together with an eye single to the one idea-the sacredness of God's creation in the individual man.

In Lincoln they recognized a man like themselves, a child of toil, who saw in the bread got by the sweat of the brow the symbol of all dignity to which man might attain, and in the degradation of toil, the serpent that was to strangle all the simplicity and dignity of life. Already they had given him the title of "Honest Abe Lincoln" and it was honesty and not brilliance or culture or senatorial robes to which they turned in that momentous hour. They chose their captain, and in that choice gave added proof that the dictum, “The voice of the people is the voice of God," may be rightly applied to that part of the people who are touched by the spirit of a sublime idea.

Many careful students of the time have sought to locate the cause of Seward's defeat by Lincoln in that Convention, but they cannot agree among themselves about it. Is it not because they concentrate their gaze upon Seward and Lincoln instead of upon the people? The sophisticated of our day can no more understand why the "great plain people" chose their great plain leader in the hour of their country's crisis, than could the sophisticated of 1860. Seward was everything the sophisticated mind could ask for a truly great man bound

heart and soul to the cause of the Union. Chase was no less so. Both had long been in the forefront of the battle out of which had sprung the Republican Party. But sophistication is a flimsy, if elegant, covering for truth, and is licked up with a single flame of genuine passion. Lincoln was the rugged granite which only returned an added glow to the heat of the hour, with its character undisturbed.

The news was flashed to Springfield that Lincoln had been nominated, and the man most concerned took the dispatch with a steady hand but with a deeper glow in those fathomless eyes, to "the little woman down the street who would like to hear the news."

His letter of acceptance is in strong contrast to most of such utterances of record. "Sir," he wrote, addressing the Honorable George Ashum, Chairman of the Convention, “I accept the nomination tendered me by the Convention over which you presided, I am formally apprised in a letter of yourself and others, acting as a Committee of the Convention for that purpose. The declaration of principles which accompanies your letter meets my approval, and it shall be my care not to violate it or disregard it in any part. Imploring the assistance of Divine Providence, and with due regard to the views and feelings of all who were represented in the Convention, to the rights of all the States and Territories and the people of the Nation, to the inviolability of the Constitution and the perpetual Union, prosperity, and harmony of all, I am most happy to coöperate for the practical success of the principles declared by the Convention."

Lincoln took no counsel for this utterance. None was needed. The platform adopted by the Convention was not written to conceal thought but to make its purpose clear. The Republican Party was born full-souled and free. It