Degree-conferring institutions of New York State (concluded)

Grand total excluding duplicates..

27 859 3 485 112 733 7 232c15 913c135 878

a L indicates this institution was incorporated by special act of the Legislature; R indicates incorporation by the Regents; E indicates that the department was established by the board of trustees of the institution of which the school is a department; GL indicates incorporation with the Secretary of State under the general law.

b Wherever higher degrees have been granted in this department they are included in the total for the university.

c This total includes 3286 diplomas granted by the Albany Normal School before it became the New York State Normal College.

dThis total does not include higher degrees if any have ever been conferred in this department.

THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES

The success of the Union armies in the Civil War expressed much more than the triumph of physical force. The war was not waged on either side for the mere subjugation of men or the enlargement of empire. The awful sacrifices were neither to ambition nor to greed. They were to democracy and the natural right of man. No arbiter was left save the sword.

The sword was held by the
But the issue was moral, intel-

Almighty and decided for the right. lectual, political, legal. Both armies were comprised of American patriots. On either side the captains and the men were so earnest in their feelings, so sincere in their thinking, that they freely pledged their devotion with their lives. The issue was moral, and when the battles were over the South was wrong. People act according to their lights. Men are right or wrong as they think they are. Historic and patriotic traditions were no less binding, intellectual culture no less marked, religious feeling no less common, in the South than in the North. But the sections had inherited differing situations, and had been trained in differing schools. The differences became fundamental in morals and in politics and had to be settled on the field. And the great court of last resort had to bend to the progress of the world. It was union, therefore democracy established in law and able to govern, therefore liberty and the Golden Rule, that triumphed through the victories of the armies of the Union.

Freedom, equality, security, opportunity, are vital to religion that is genuine, to education that is of worth, to politics that inspire, to work that makes much of the workman. They are empty words without law and the power to enforce it. The democracy which in combination they create had taken long strides, in the old world and particularly in the new, before our Civil War, but democracy was overweighted until the manhood, the legal philosophy, the statecraft of Lincoln shaped the politics which forced the war and opened the way for the logical evolution of the nation. He did it in public discussion with the foremost statesman of the day. It is this that lifts the Lincoln-Douglas debates to the very highest plane in the history of America.

Slavery had existed in the North and it existed throughout the South when the Union was formed. It was much discussed in the convention which formed the Constitution. No word of the Con

Address before the Albany Institute and Art Society, Albany N. Y., February 10, 1910.

stitution forbade it. The instrument recognized it in fixing the representation in Congress; it even went so far as to forbid prohibition of the foreign slave trade for twenty years. All the implications of the Constitution accorded the legal right to ownership and trade in human property within territorial limits. Without this the more perfect union could not be. And " union" had to be: without it the Revolution had been in vain, and independence and democracy would be but bursting bubbles. The only course was taken. Not in apology but in fairness it should be said that slavery had been common the world over, that its forms and its evils were not in very aggravated form in America, and that its adherents were not all in the South nor its opponents altogether in the North. But as the country grew in population and in territory, the slave system grew in strength and in inherent viciousness. It created more adherents and opponents, and the contentions which it forced became serious and threatening.

From the beginning to the end only a glorious few dealt with it on moral grounds. There were incidents enough to stir the moral sensibilities in the North. The moral sensibilities of the South were never much disturbed. But let it not be implied that the South was without moral sensibilities. The South recognized theoretical wrong in slavery, but believed that the actual wrongs would be more and greater without it than with it. But moral issues do not down. As the lines formed, freedom gained in conviction and in determination, and slavery grew in resourcefulness, in speciousness, in legal subtleties, and in oratorical power.

Politics clouded and confused the issues. Political parties tried to get in or to keep in power. Of course their attitudes were shifty until moral sense forced its political and its legal opportunity. Pretense, subterfuge, and bargaining, delayed the issue which organized parties feared to meet.

While the lawyers and statesmen were practically agreed that there could be no forcible outlawry of slavery by Congress in the states which had it when they came into the Union, the question as to the power of Congress over national territory beyond the organized states, and in reference to states seeking admission to the Union, was a large and difficult one. Congress had, before the Constitution, assumed to prohibit slavery in the old North West Territory, out of which the states of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana have been constituted, but that was when the general expectation was that the whole country would become free, and the