press shall never be violated. Yet Lincoln did that. Why? In order to suppress insurrection in certain States of the Union.

Do you realize that when the Chief Justice of the United States, the highest judicial power in the land, issued a writ of habeas corpus to get Merryman out of jail at Baltimore, Lincoln refused to allow the writ? Why? In order to suppress the rebellion in the Southern States.

Do you realize that he confiscated hundreds and thousands of dollars' worth of Southern slave property, when he had no right under the Constitution to free the cheapest, meanest slave that ever breathed? Why did he do this? In order to suppress insurrection, and save the Union that our fathers had given to us. The people allowed him to do this-the people allowed him to use these extraneous powers, because they knew that at the end of the War, when it was all over, he would hand back the government to them. He would not usurp their power. They understood him; they knew him; they trusted him; and all because he used simple language within the public comprehension.

Lincoln was reared in the Mississippi Valley; he knew little about the Old World; he never visited Europe; he was purely an American. By contrast with him, George Washington was nothing more than an English gentleman living over here in America. I do not do injustice to the shade of George Washington if I say that by contrast with Lincoln, he simply reflected England. For instance, George Washington sent to England to get his coat of arms. He had the Washington arms in silver on the harness of his horses; he also had it on the coach which he used as President. You are sure to see that coach because it is preserved in three different places in the United States at the present time! Did Abraham Lincoln have any coat of arms? I never saw it. If he did, the device must have been two rails, a maul, and a wedge. George Washington sent to England to get his family tree. He traced the beginning of his family back to the Conquerors; it is just as good a family tree as you can buy now-a-days. Did Abraham Lincoln have any family tree traced out? No.

Over here on the frontier the settlers were too busy with the other kind of trees to pay much attention to family trees. Even when Lincoln went to Congress he wrote to a man named Lincoln, living in Virginia, trying to find out something more about his own grandfather.

George Washington had his clothes made in England up to the time of the Revolutionary War. Were Abraham Lincoln's clothes made in England? It makes you smile to think of it. As a young boy the wool for his clothes was grown in Kentucky and spun there, and was there dyed with the juice of the butternut tree.

The result was that Abraham Lincoln reflected the American environment, and George Washington reflected the Old World environment. They were nearly one hundred years apart. George Washington was President eight years and had one task, and that was a foreign problem-how to keep from going to war with England on the one side, or with France on the other. He set the pattern for neutrality for America, which, thank God, we have not departed from in all the years that have followed. He set the pattern that we should be free at Washington from entangling alliances with other nations. Abraham Lincoln was President a little over four years, and what was his task? To save the American Union; a task peculiarly American. And his American environment, in the Providence of God, had fitted him to meet that problem.

Lincoln was the most original American who ever reached the presidency, and was also the most misunderstood. We have never had a man in all American history who, in his life, was as much vituperated and blamed, and, in his death, as praised and deified as was Abraham Lincoln.

I wish I could show to you a collection of cartoons I possess showing how Lincoln was caricatured, how he was vilified during the Civil War; misunderstood always, both before and after he was elected President. Lincoln suffered such disadvantage as few men have suffered when coming into that high office. He lacked nearly half a million votes of having a majority for President-nearly half a million popular votes. Then how could he be elected? Only by means of our elect

oral system, voting by States. If the choice had demanded a majority of the popular vote, Lincoln would not have been elected. Furthermore, he never could have been elected if there had not been a split in the Democratic party. And, still further, he never could have got the nomination away from William H. Seward, of New York, if the convention had not been held in Chicago.

The corner of Lake and Market Streets was occupied in 1860 by a great wooden structure which they called the "Wigwam." Horace Greeley came on from New York to report the convention, and he wrote back to his paper, "The Republicans have built a great structure which they call the Wigwam. God help the Indians if they ever lived in as ugly a building as this!" The second day he wrote, "The Seward people have made a mistake in allowing the convention to come to Chicago, because they are all Lincoln men out here.' Greeley also wrote in his correspondence to the Tribune, "Yesterday the Seward men began the shouting, but to-day the Lincoln men had the best of it." Thereby hangs a tale as told by David Davis, one of the Lincoln managers. Seward had chartered a whole railroad train and sent it on to Chicago full of New York supporters to shout for Seward in the convention. They were headed by Tom Hyers, a celebrated prize fighter, and the first day they filled the galleries of the "Wigwam," and the Lincoln men could not get in. That night the Lincoln men went out to Evanston and secured a man who said he was the mate, or the captain, of a vessel. Whatever he was, all agreed that he had a voice that could drown any fog horn on the Great Lakes. They brought that man in that night, and when the Seward men went out to serenade the Seward headquarters at two o'clock in the morning, the Lincoln men stuffed the galleries full of their own followers, under the leadership of this captain. When the Seward men came back the following morning, they could not get into the building. The result was, as Greeley said, "The Lincoln men to-day have the best of the shouting. In the balloting they gradually won State after State, until finally a man sitting on the roof, and drawing up by a string