together that he might earn a living at his profession. Douglas was a ready and fascinating political speaker and forensic orator. Yet it is difficult to find paragraphs in his speeches which one feels warranted in quoting, either for their substance or their style. Lincoln's speeches are practically all quotable, because they were filled with logical and convincing reasoning, because of their clarity of statement, and because they are models of a distinguishing and beautiful English style.

The two men knew each other well. They lived in the same town for ten years. They were in the Legislature and in Congress at the same time. Douglas was transferred from the House of Representatives to the Senate the day that Lincoln entered the House for his only term in Congress. Both have declared that there was no personal ill will between them. They were good friends. The two men were of very unequal public experience and standing. Lincoln was forty-nine years of age, and Douglas forty-five. Lincoln was somewhat known for character and ability in Illinois, but had made no impression beyond the state. Douglas's personal integrity and his patriotism were not doubted. His position in public life was above that of any other man of the year 1858. Six years before he had strong support in the national convention of his party for the presidency, and it was commonly assumed that he would reach that high station. For more than eleven years he had been in the Senate, and for half of that time was the preeminent leader of the great party which had controlled the federal government from Jefferson's administration. In the most painstaking address Mr Blaine ever delivered, the eulogy of Garfield, he said that Douglas was one of the three great parliamentary leaders this country has produced.

Lincoln requested the joint debates. Douglas granted the request reluctantly. Both had engagements extending through the entire campaign. Seven joint debates were arranged, one in a county town in each of the Congressional districts of the state, except the Chicago and Springfield districts where both had spoken. Douglas named the places and the debates, and stipulated that on each occasion one speaker should have an hour, the other an hour and a half, and then the first a half hour in closing, and that he himself should have the opening and the close at four of the seven meetings. Lincoln suggested that this was hardly just, but accepted the arrangement. The towns

were all small. Two of them were remote from railroads. All of the meetings were in the open air. The crowds embraced thousands of people, who sometimes traveled all of the night before to be on hand at the appointed time. Partisanship was rife, but the crowds were good natured and tolerant, and each of the speakers had a quiet hearing except as Douglas said something like personal affront to the listeners.

The Senator opened the debate at Ottawa by saying that prior to 1854 the Whig and Democratic parties were not sectional; that they had differed about banks and money and tariffs, but not about slavery; that they had united in the compromise measures of 1850, particularly in Illinois, that none but the few ultra abolitionists had dissented; that in 1854 he introduced the Nebraska bill allowing states to decide for themselves whether or not they would have slavery; that thereupon Abraham Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull, one a Whig and the other a Democrat, had agreed to act together in the formation of the Republican party, for the purpose of effecting their election as United State senators, one to succeed General Shields in 1856, and the other to succeed himself in 1859. Lincoln was to bring in all the Whigs, and transfer them, as Douglas said, “to Giddings, Chase, Fred Douglass, and Parson Lovejoy," and Trumbull was to "bring old Democrats, handcuffed and bound hand and foot, into the abolition camp."

He then assumed to read the platform of the first Republican State Convention held at Springfield in 1854, favoring separation from old parties and the organization of a new one; opposing any extension of slavery and demanding the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law. He charged Lincoln with this and wanted to know whether he occupied the same attitude in 1858 as in 1854.

He made personal allusions which are worth repeating.

"I have known him (Lincoln) for nearly twenty-five years. There were many points of sympathy between us when we first got acquainted. We were both comparatively boys, both struggling with poverty in a strange land. I was a school teacher in the town of Winchester, and he a flourishing grocery-keeper in the town of Salem. He was more successful in his occupation than I was in mine, and hence more fortunate in this world's goods. Lincoln is one of those peculiar men who perform with admirable skill everything which they undertake. I made as good a school teacher as I could, and when a cabinetmaker I made a good bedstead and tables, although my old boss said I succeeded better with bureaus and secretaries than

with anything else; but I believe that Lincoln was always more successful in business than I, for his business enabled him to get into the Legislature. I met him there, however, and had sympathy with him, because of the uphill struggle we both had in life. He was then just as good at telling an anecdote as now. He could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper; could ruin more liquor than all the boys of the town together, and the dignity and impartiality with which he presided at a horse race or fist fight excited the admiration and won the praise of everybody that was present and participated. I sympathized with him because he was struggling with difficulties, and so was I."

He then charged Lincoln with opposing the Mexican War, when in Congress, and "taking the side of the common enemy against his country."

He said things about Lincoln's friend, Lyman Trumbull, too, and alleged that Trumbull had overreached Lincoln in the senatorial election of 1856, and got for himself the place which it had been arranged that Lincoln should have.

He then read the famous passage from Lincoln's speech to the convention which nominated him for senator in June. It is as follows:

"In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. 'A house divided against itself can not stand.' I believe this government can not endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved I do not expect the house to fall; but 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."

He insisted that this was not only absurd because the Union had existed part slave and part free from the beginning, but that it was revolutionary and would wreck the Union unless repudiated.

He called Lincoln to account for "warfare on the Supreme Court," because its decision in the Dred Scott case deprived negroes "of the rights and privileges of citizenship."

He argued his points with great force. His repeated allusions to "Black" Republicans stirred irritation in the audience which was openly expressed, but he had made a telling speech

and his closing sentences against sectional warfare commanded general approbation.

Mr Lincoln opened with the remark that misrepresentation provokes a man, but gross misrepresentation amuses him. He denied that he had anything to do with the platform of 1854 which Douglas had read; denied that there had been any agreebetween Trumbull and himself about the senatorship; said Lovejoy had tried to get him into the Republican Convention of 1854 but he had refused, and although they had named him on a committee he had had nothing to do with that organization. He demanded that the Judge should prove his allegations, and read from a speech he (Lincoln) made at Peoria in 1854 to show that Douglas knew what his attitudes were at that time and misrepresented them. He disavowed any desire for "social and political equality with the negro," and suggested that a man who could get up a fantastic arrangement of words " to prove that he had such desire might be able to prove "that a horse-chestnut was a chestnut horse." He said there was a physical difference between the races which would probably forbid their living together on terms of perfect equality, "but in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, the negro is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."

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He showed no resentment and made no answer to the Senator's unjust and probably facetious allusions to his personal career, further than to deny that he had kept a grocery, to observe that it would have been a credit to him if he had, and to volunteer that he had worked for a short time "in a still, at the end of a hollow." It may as well be said here, that from the beginning to the end of the debates Lincoln's absolute good nature gave him an advantage with his hearers, while Douglas's frequent irritation cost him rather heavily.

He appealed to the record to show that he had voted in Congress against approving the Mexican War but in favor of clothing and feeding the soldiers.

Apparently he talked under some excitement, for at this point he noted that he had not consumed as much of his hour and a half as he had supposed, and so he turned back. Referring to his saying that "a house divided against itself can not stand," he exclaimed "Does the Judge say it can stand? If he does then there is a question of veracity, not between him and me, but between the Judge and an authority of a somewhat higher character."

He admitted that the Union had continued for eighty years part slave and part free, but because slavery was restricted to a section and was expected to disappear. The Constitution did not contemplate the extension of slavery into territory already free, and looked to the suppression of the slave trade. He urged that the Dred Scott case, the new Fugitive Slave Law, and particularly Douglas's Nebraska Act, had put the "institution on a new basis which looks to the perpetuity and nationalization of slavery."

He described "popular sovereignty" as a device which would allow the people of a territory to have slavery if they want to, but not allow them not to have it if they do not want to," and showed that Douglas had refused to accept an amendment offered to his bill in the Senate by Chase, expressly empowering the people of a territory to prohibit slavery therein, if they saw fit.

He took distinct issue with the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, and charged that it would be as easy for the court to go further and hold that even a state already organized could not exclude slavery without invading the implications and intentions of the federal Constitution, as to do what it had done. He charged collusion between the Congressional leaders and the Supreme Court, as evidenced in the Dred Scott decision and the Nebraska bill, in the effort to make the extension of slavery easy and the extension of freedom difficult. Let us read two or three closing paragraphs from Lincoln's extemporaneous speaking in this first joint debate:

This man sticks to a decision which forbids the people of a territory from excluding slavery, and he does so, not because he says it is right in itself - he does not give any opinion on that but because it has been decided by the court, and being decided by the court, he is, and you are, bound to take it in your political action as law, not that he judges at all of its merits, but because a decision of the court is to him a Thus saith the Lord.' He places it on that ground alone, and you will bear in mind that thus committing himself unreservedly to this decision commits him to the next one just as firmly as to this. He did not commit himself on account of the merit or demerit of the decision, but it is a Thus saith the Lord.' The next decision, as much as this, will be a 'Thus saith the Lord.' "There is nothing that can divert or turn him away from this decision. It is nothing that I point out to him that his great prototype, General Jackson, did not believe in the binding force of decisions. It is nothing to him that Jefferson did not so