In his Alton speech, made on the fifteenth of October, 1858, he said:

"That is the real issue. It is the eternal struggle between two principles-right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the 'divine right of kings.' It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, 'You toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle."

You will bear in mind that Lincoln's Springfield speech of June 17, 1858, his Bloomington speech of September 4, 1858, and this Alton speech of October 15, 1858, wherein he stated that the struggle between freedom and slavery was only one form of the eternal struggle between right and wrong, were all made before William H. Seward, on the twenty-fifth of October, 1858, at Rochester, New York, made his celebrated "irrepressible conflict" speech.

Perhaps the strength and force of Lincoln's reasoning powers and intense convictions is best shown by a brief extract from his Cooper Institute speech in New York:

"If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we (the North) cannot justly object to its nationality— its universality; if it is wrong, they (the South) cannot justly insist upon its extension-its enlargement. All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in these free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

From these extracts from his political speeches, and from his recorded words uttered in his two Inaugural Addresses and at Gettysburg, you know that here was a man equal to any occasion-a leader on all occasions.

Who were the men who were present on the twenty-ninth of May, 1856, in Major's Hall, and heard Lincoln's speech on that occasion? Several of them in after years received from Illinois her highest honors:-The President of the Convention, John M. Palmer, Governor, United States Senator; O. H. Browning, United States Senator, Secretary of the Interior, Acting Attorney-General of the United States; Richard Yates, Governor, United States Senator; Richard J. Oglesby, three times Governor, United States Senator; David Davis, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, United States Senator, Acting Vice-President.

The Convention was called to order at ten o'clock. As stated by General Palmer at the meeting of May 29, 1900, commemorative of this Convention, "The Convention was created by the intense hostility of the American people to the extension of human slavery into free territory.

Palmer and Cook spoke in the forenoon. Owen Lovejoy, Lincoln, and Burton C. Cook spoke in the afternoon. Palmer and Cook were old Democrats; Yates and Browning were old Whigs; and Owen Lovejoy was a Liberty Party man.

The next issue of the Weekly Pantagraph (June 4, 1856) gives the following editorial account of the proceedings:

"We never saw such unanimity and enthusiasm manifested in a similar assemblage. Men were here acting in counsel and harmony, who have hitherto been antipodes in political parties. Although six candidates were nominated for State officers, not a ballot was cast all were unanimously nominated by acclamation."

Let me stop a moment to say that all the candidates of the new party then and there organized were elected-the gallant Colonel William H. Bissell for Governor, and, for State Treasurer, our own James Miller, in remembrance of whom Bloomington has named her beautiful park and lake. Now, listen while I read the concluding part of the Pantagraph editorial—a statement so concise, so terse, so true:

"Several most heart-stirring and powerful speeches were made during the Convention; but without being invidious, we must say that Mr. Lincoln on Thursday evening surpassed all others-even himself. His points were unanswerable, and the force and power of his appeals, irresistible and were received with a storm of applause.”

Some of us, a few, heard that "storm of applause," at the close of Lincoln's Major's Hall Speech, and some of us, a few, four years later in the Wigwam at Chicago, heard the "thunderous" applause that followed the announcement of his nomination for the presidency of the United States.

Listen again while I read the editorial correspondence of The Democratic Press of Chicago, written that night at eleven o'clock (May 29, eleven p. m.):

"Abraham Lincoln of Springfield was next called out, and made the speech of the occasion. Never has it been our fortune to listen to a more eloquent and masterly presentation of a subject. I shall not mar any of its proportions or brilliant passages by attempting even a synopsis of it. Mr. Lincoln must write it out and let it go before all the people. For an hour and a half he held the assemblage spellbound by the power of his argument, the intense irony of his invective, and the deep earnestness and fervid brilliancy of his eloquence. When he concluded, the audience sprang to their feet, and cheer after cheer told how deeply their hearts had been touched, and their souls warmed up to a generous enthusiasm.”

Listen to the testimony of John G. Nicolay, one of the authors of Nicolay and Hay's, "Abraham Lincoln: A History":

"I had the good fortune to be one of the delegates from Pike County in the Bloomington Convention of 1856, and to hear the inspiring address delivered by Abraham Lincoln at its close, which held the audience in such rapt attention that the reporters dropped their pencils and forgot their work."

Governor Palmer in his "Bench and Bar of Illinois" (page 538) has put on record this statement:

"At the Bloomington State Convention in 1856, where the new party first assumed form in Illinois, Lincoln made the greatest speech in his life, in which, for the first time, he took distinctive grounds against

slavery in itself. Thenceforth he became the leader of his party in the State."

Again, at the meeting in 1900, commemorative of the Convention, Governor Palmer said:

"Mr. Lincoln made a speech before the Convention, which was of marvellous power and force and fully vindicated the new movement in opposition to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise."

General Thomas J. Henderson was a delegate to the Convention, and afterwards for twenty years a member of Congress. This is what he said at the commemorative meeting in 1900:

"The great speech of that Convention was the speech made by Abraham Lincoln. His speech was of such wonderful eloquence and power that it fairly electrified the members of the Convention and everybody who heard it. It was a great speech, in what he said, in the burning eloquence of his words, and in the manner in which he delivered it. If ever such a speech was inspired in this world, it has always seemed to me that that speech of Mr. Lincoln's was. aroused the Convention, and all who heard it sympathized with the speaker, to the highest pitch of enthusiasm. I have never heard any other speech that had such a great power and influence over those to whom it was addressed. I have always believed it to have been the greatest speech Mr. Lincoln ever made, and the greatest speech to which I ever listened."

It

On the twenty-eighth day of January, 1865, Mr. Lincoln signed the Joint Resolution of Congress, proposing, in almost the very words of the Ordinance of 1787 and of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, whereby slavery was prohibited in every place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Then his part of the great work was done. By that Amendment the one object-freedom-for which he made all his political speeches, was fully attained.

His Bloomington Speech in Major's Hall made Lincoln the Illinois leader of a new party which, within one year, took possession of our State government, and four years later placed him at the head of the nation.

The roof and walls of Major's Hall have long since disap