out the concurrence of every key-the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is."

We have had occasion to note Lincoln's devotion to the spirit of the Constitution: that devotion was almost more marked for the Declaration of Independence, the charter of the rights of Democracy; and he never tired of extolling the second paragraph which begins: "We hold these truths to be self-evident : That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." In the Springfield speech, he declared that the equality predicated was intended to apply to all men, and not to a particular colour or race as Douglas was fain to argue: and he pointed out that the statement was cleared of a mere vague generality by its definition of the equal rights which were declared to be possessed by all, rights not indeed at that time in the possession of all, but rights which it was the duty of the American Government to enforce as rapidly as circumstances permitted.

As a State Document the Declaration was not merely intended by the Fathers of the Revolution to mark, and aid in effecting, the separation of the American Colonies from Great Britain. "They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly laboured for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and

thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colours everywhere. The assertion that 'all men are created equal' was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be -as thank God, it is now proving itself—a stumblingblock to all those who in aftertimes might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation, they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack."

This was spoken at the end of June. During the autumn, though he was closely engaged in the courts, Lincoln's political position in Illinois became steadily stronger, and there seemed good reason to believe that he would be nominated and elected United States Senator in the following year. But an unforeseen circumstance intervened.

The two parties in Kansas had tried their strength at the polls, the slavery party voting for the so-called Lecompton Constitution, and the free-state party, now in the majority, for that of Topeka. A Congressional Committee had exposed the electoral frauds by which a minority of pro-slavery men had secured the complete military and political control of the territory. But in spite of this, the President decided in favour of admitting Kansas to the Union as a slave-state under the fraudulent Lecompton Constitution. This was too much for Douglas, who really believed in popular

sovereignty and held that the people of Kansas should freely decide their own destinies. His personal feeling, his political principles, the party position in his own State, all combined to render support of the Administration on this point impossible, and at the end of 1857 he broke with that section of his party which controlled the power and patronage of the President. It was a bold act, and added much and rightly to Douglas's personal prestige. Politically, it resulted in his retention of the senatorship, but also in his subsequent loss, for a third and last time, of the presidency.

Douglas's heroic struggle against the Lecompton Constitution, though a forlorn hope in the Senate, resulted in its defeat in the Lower House. It won him the admiration of Seward, the most powerful of the Republican Leaders, and of Horace Greeley, editor of The New York Tribune, who went so far as to urge that he should be supported for the Senatorship by all the anti-Lecompton men in Illinois.

Lincoln's position thus became difficult. He knew that the author of the Nebraska bill was by no means a Republican at heart, and that, to accept him in Illinois, meant to make him the national leader of the party, and so to destroy the party itself. Greeley's attitude gave him such anxiety that he was glad when Herndon decided to go to Washington, New York, and New England to feel the pulse of Eastern opinion. He there found that, while some among them took Greeley's view, Lincoln was becoming known and respected by the national leaders of the party. Yet the defections were serious, and perhaps the most serious of all-one which, as Lincoln himself con

sidered, cost him the Senatorship-was that of Senator Crittenden, the old Whig leader in Kentucky, and the former friend of Henry Clay.

By June, however, Republican opinion in Illinois itself seemed to be completely united in favour of a contest, and when the Convention met in Springfield, Lincoln's was the only name upon men's lips.

On receiving the enthusiastic and unanimous nomination, he responded with the now famous pronouncement which he had long been preparing— writing it, as it came to him in moments of inspiration, upon scraps of paper carefully deposited in his hata pronouncement upon which he accepted no advice, submitting it to no one until a few hours before its delivery. Then it was received with blank astonishment and horror by his friends. Herndon says that he was the only one of them all who approved it.

But Lincoln's mind was set. "Friends," he said, "this thing has been retarded long enough.1 The time has come when these sentiments should be uttered; and if it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the truth-let me die in the advocacy of what is just and right." A few months earlier Douglas had used similar words in the Senate: "If, standing firmly by my principles, I should be driven into private life, it is a fate that has no terrors for me." Both men were in earnest and had now burned their boats; the issue was to be a battle of giants, and a battle to the death.

And now, what was the issue as Lincoln defined it

1 It is said that he had begun to promulgate "this thing" two years before, but on the advice of his friends had withdrawn it as then inopportune. See page 142.

I

that night of the 16th June 1858? These are his actual words: "Mr President and Gentlemen of the Convention: If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed. object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. "A house divided against itself cannot stand.' believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved-I do not expect the house to fallbut I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction: or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South."

Lincoln, having defined "squatter sovereignty" as the doctrine "that if any one man choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object," pointed out that those who upheld it were now being carried along inevitably towards the far more startling position, to which the Dred Scott decision pointed the way, that no Territory, and indeed no State, can constitutionally exclude slavery. And he went so far as to suggest that there was a great conspiracy to this end, to which Douglas himself, as well as President