Meeting Mr. Lincoln the next day at the hotel I requested permission to print that interview at his private residence in my paper, he replied, “I'd a heap rather you had done it without asking me." This was a characteristic precaution in Lincoln that his endorsement should not even by inference appear to such an absurdity as the interview on the issuing of the manifesto. So I never printed it.

Owen Lovejoy firmly believed that the constitution was intended to protect human liberty and if rightly interpreted would do away with slavery. He did not even favor an amendment in that behalf, deeming it not necessary. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Lovejoy a number of times. I heard him deliver a speech at Amboy, Lee county, during a presidential campaign, when he was assisting to elect the Republican ticket. In that speech he urged the radical Abolitionists to support Lincoln, they generally having refused to do so, for the reason that the Republicans did not propose any action leading to the abolition of slavery. He told them the Republican party was going their way. To illustrate that idea he said that if he were walking on the road to Chicago, and a man passing in a wagon should ask him to ride, it would not be good sense for him to refuse because the man was going only a few miles on his route. He would not refuse to ride with the man because he was not going through to Chicago. No, he would climb in and ride as far as he went his way. So long as the Republicans are on their road he would advise radical Abolitionists to get in and ride with them, inasmuch as they were both going in the same direction.

I again met Mr. Lovejoy on a train enroute for Freeport, the day of Lincoln and Douglas' joint debate there. He was not in a pleasant humor. At Ottawa a few days before Douglas with a sneer had classed Lincoln as a Lovejoy Abolitionist in a manner intimating that the latter was of the radical class, thus misrepresenting the gentlemen from Princeton, much to his dislike. Remembering the temper he was in, after arriving at Freeport, when the debate was over, in the evening I suggested to a number of friends

that Mr. Lovejoy was in a humor to make a speech, and we would call him out. A dry goods box was improvised as a platform in front of the Brewster House and he readily responded to the call. I shall never forget that speech and magnificent appearance of the speaker; a man of splendid physique, Websterian mold of countenance, all aglow with flame of intellectual genius, interested deeply in the cause of humanity. Douglas had put the question to Lincoln, "Would he, if an officer of the law, return a fugitive slave to his master?" Lovejoy answered the interrogatory in scathing phillipics against Douglas and all others who had voted for the Fugitive Slave law. Taking the pythagorean idea of transmigration, he had the soul of Douglas turned into a savage bloodhound on the track of a slave escaping from bondage. A man innocent of crime, only a polar star as a guide to a freedom justly his, the man-greyhound in hot pursuit, lapping the mire by the wayside to quench his hellish thirst for blood. The cubless tigress raging in the jungle for her slaughtered offspring is touching sympathy compared with the man who would hunt down an innocent being that he might enslave.

A gem was lost when that speech was not reported and published. Douglas was a great leader, at one time beloved by the entire Democratic party. He lacked only one vote and a half of becoming president. His repeal of the Missouri Compromise proved his downfall. It caused great indignation in the north, and when he saw a Democratic president, a man of his own party, use all the influence and power of government in forcing slavery upon the unwilling people of Kansas where he had promised that people should be "free to vote slavery up or down," he was appalled at the diabolical enormities committed in the name of Democracy. He rebelled against the administration and then the southern leaders, heretofore friendly, whom he had always befriended, turned against him. Abolitionists had not endured more bitter insult than were heaped upon the senator from Illinois by southerners whose cause he had so favored. Hosts of friends in the north had ignominiously deserted him for the political acts

he had performed for the south. It was a monstrous ingratitude by the southern leaders. In Douglas it was a "grievous fault and grievously hath he answered it.” His terrible plight is described by the poet Byron:

"As the struck eagle, stretched upon the plain,
No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
Viewed his own feather on the fatal dart,

And winged the shaft that quivered in his heart,
Keen were his pangs, but keener far to feel

He nursed the pinion that impelled the steel
While the same plumage that had warmed his nest,

Drank the last life-blood of his bleeding breast."

In a talk of Republicanism in Illinois, we must needs. speak of Stephen A. Douglas, its greatest opponent until the close of his life, when he became its warm supporter; an accomplished orator, wonderful debater, beloved at one time by millions of his countrymen. Small in stature and mighty in intellect, he was known as the "Little Giant.” But alas, history classes him in the vast list where

"Vaulting ambition o'er leaps itself."

My friend, John H. Bryant, of Princeton, who was to speak today on the subject assigned me, but declined on account of ill health, in June, 1856, closed a letter to his brother, the great poet, in regard to the Bloomington convention, and especially politics in Illinois, with assurance that "She is solid for Freedom and the Constitution, for Republicanism and Right."

The words "Freedom and the Constitution" fully express the position of the Constitutional Abolitionists and Republicans of that day.

A Few Words for the Bloomington Commemoration Meeting,

BY GEN. JAMES M. RUGGLES.

It matters little that forty-four years ago, previous to the time of the Bloomington convention, my name was the only one prominent as the running mate of Governor Bissell for lieutenant governor, that I was one of the vice-presidents of that convention—or that in February previously at a meeting at the capital of Whigs and Free Soil Democrats who were ready for the organization of a party more fully representing the tide of advanced political principles, I was one of the committee associated with Abraham Lincoln and Ebenezer Peck, and prepared the resolutions adopted at the meeting which led to the convention held on the 29th of May, 1856.

It matters much, however, that the convention was held and that a portion of the leading men of both parties came together and took their places beside Abraham Lincoln on a platform of expansion of free territory, enlarged human rights and human liberty, and expanded patriotism, on which basis every man nominated was elected and placed in office.

The time was auspicious. We were then under the last of the old time Democratic governors in Illinois who had appropriated to his own use about a quarter of a million dollars in state bonds and left the state a ruined man and a political party badly smirched. Since then we have had but one Democratic governor and he has made all other governors quite respectable—comparatively!

The nation was also in a turmoil over the slavery question. Lincoln had not yet announced the problem that "the nation could not long endure half slave and half free❞—but the events then transpiring justified the assertion. Kansas was the theatre of operations of the Missouri Jay-hawkers, who without restraint of the administration were madly rushing on to the de