bridge, and Douglas hesitated what to do. He knew that the people of Kansas would vote down the land bribe, but he feared that he could not convince his constituency in Illinois that it was not treacherous to yield. Hence the attitude of Greeley in his letter to Mr. Herndon; but when Douglas decided to stand firm Greeley renewed his advice to the Illinois Republicans. Herndon wrote to Parker:

Friend Parker.

Springfield, Ill., May 29, 1858.

Dear Sir:-Yours of the 13th is before me and in answer to which let me say: I would have been highly pleased to have met at your house a few friends, but as it was I did not. My object in visiting Boston was education, and the purposes to which that education was to be specially applied was Liberty speeches. I expect to be a Republican elector in 1860. I wanted to see the places of Revolutionary memory, and the three living institutions of Boston Garrison, Parker, and Phillips. So that when I wanted to speak of things I could talk knowingly; and when such men as you were thrown in the way of the Republican march, for base purposes, and by mean men for infamous ends, I wanted to say to the vile slanderers, "You lie!" It is all right. I do not complain, though I must say that I was somewhat disappointed. Do you suppose that this will alter my respect for you? God forbid! You know me to little purpose if you think I am so small as that. Here is my hand and my heart. Let this matter drop from your fingers into the ocean.

We are to have a Republican convention here, in this city, on June 16th. The Buchanan convention comes off here on June 7th. We expect to have fun at the latter. Douglas, it is said, is to be crushed by the Administration: it does not look that way, if we are to judge from what has lately happened in Congress. Friend Greeley seems determined that this shall not be, if he can help it, though he sacrified the Republicans in Illinois. Politicians will use other people's paws to pull the chestnuts out of the fire. Greeley injures us in Illinois while he is trying to sustain Douglas. I have made two political speeches since I saw you one in this city and one at Petersburg - took high grounds for Freedom. Your friend, W. H. HERNDON.

On the following day Mr. Herndon received a letter from Greeley, in reply to a stinging protest against the interference of the latter in Illinois politics. If the Republicans will not support Douglas for the Senate, he hopes they will stand by Harris for the House. The letter reads:

Friend Herndon:

New York, May 29, 1858.

I have yours of the 7th. I have not proposed to instruct the Republicans of Illinois in their political duties, and I doubt very much that even so much as is implied in your letter can be fairly deduced from anything I have written.

Let me make one prediction. If you run a candidate against Harris and he is able to canvass, he will beat you badly. He is more of a man, at heart and morally, than Douglas, and has gone into the fight with more earnestness and less calculation. Of the whole Douglas party, he is the truest and best. I never have spoken a dozen words with him in my life, having met him but once; but if I lived in his district I should vote for him. As I have never spoken of him in my paper, and suppose I never shall, I take the liberty to say this much to you. Now paddle your own dugout. Yours, HORACE GREELEY.

If he had actually left the Illinois Republicans to paddle their own canoe, the result might have been different in the autumn, but he kept on tossing logs into the stream. By this time it had been determined that Lincoln was to make the race for the Senate, and, in the picturesque Illinois phrase, "set the prairies afire" against Douglas. Herndon wrote to Mr. Parker describing the situation :

Friend Parker:

Springfield, Ill., June 1, 1858.

I want to talk politics with you a moment, leaving all other things way behind." Do you remember, when I was in Boston, I told you that Douglas said, "Do not put any confidence in what Greeley says about his information in relation to the non-passage of the Lecompton constitution?" Has not Douglas proved a prophet once in his villainous life? He told me at the same time that he and the Republicans would work together, soon, on some moves that is, Cuba and Central Mexican affairs; and now as his

word was good in one particular, let us put a little confidence in "Hell's dread prophet ?? on this assertion of his about Cuba and Mexico. This is a great world, is it not, my friend?

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We, the Republicans, out here are comparing hands, seeing how we feel and stand, so that we may go into the great battle" of 1858-9 in Illinois, between Slavery and Freedom, Douglas and Lincoln, Democracy and Republicanism. It will be a life and death fight, so far as Democracy is concerned. If she goes gurgling down beneath the red waves of slaughter, she is gone forever. Not so with Republicanism; she is young, vital and energetic, and so can survive defeat - yea, frown on it; it will stiffen her backbone, harden her pulpy frame. I will do all I can to hold the leader's hands up! Your friend, W. H. HERNDON.

So matters stood on the eve of the great debates, in which Shiloh was fought at Ottawa and Gettysburg at Freeport. Had Lincoln been a guileless Parsifal in politics, as so many have portrayed him, he could not have saved his party in that critical hour when the voices of expediency, and the advice of friends, pleaded for a lowering of the ideal. Still less could he have met the astute, artful, masterful Douglas, whose resourcefulness was only surpassed by his unctuous and persuasive sophistry. If personal ambition played its part with Lincoln, as it has with all men great and small, far more potent was the ambition to serve the truth as God gave him to see it. Nor did any man ever have a truer partner, a more faithful friend, or a more tireless fellow-worker than Herndon.

I

As the date of the Republican convention approached, Lincoln became solitary and even sad. Knowing that he was to be named as the standard-bearer of his party, and knowing that it was a time of crisis both for himself and his cause, he was much alone with his thoughts, pondering what to do. Herndon knew the moods of his partner- his profound abstraction, his fits of silence and gloom and he respected them to the utmost. When he saw that long, gaunt figure sitting for hours in the corner of the office, his chair tilted against the wall, his hands clasped about his knees, his head bowed, apparently unconscious of all that was going on, he did not intrude. This time, however, abstraction and melancholy seemed to be blended, and the younger man watched the outcome with solicitude.

Slowly and sadly the thinker reviewed in his mind the history of slavery aggression, beginning with the effort made to denounce the King of Great Britain for establishing slavery in the colonies, which the fathers sought to include in the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence. Even then there were protests from the South, and that paragraph had to be stricken out. That was the first concession to the Slave Power. Multitudes of concessions had followed through the years, each one granting some special privilege to the Slave States, which had only served to whet their appetites for more. Gradually the feeling that slavery was an evil to be tolerated had given way, for economic reasons, to the feeling that it was a necessary institution to be fostered. All down the years it had rested like a pall upon the republic-present at all disagreements, making a fear and a reservation in all public gatherings, holding the best emotions and the widest patriotism in thrall. At last it had become boldly, insolently, defiantly aggressive, brandishing a threat of disunion whenever its advance was impeded.

With the renewal of the agitation in 1854, almost every variety of opinion had come to exist among the people respecting slavery and the future of the Union; for all divined that

the two were vitally related. Some were for freedom, immediate and universal, regardless of the Union, and some in the same way were for slavery. Others were for the Union, regardless of slavery or freedom; while still others foresaw a Union in which universal freedom, if not a present blessing, would be, at least, an assured, albeit distant, hope and prophecy. This last class, to which Lincoln belonged, held that by restricting the cause of discord the Union might be steered safely between abolitionism and perpetual slavery, to its proper destiny. But the signs of such a destiny were not propitious. By the terms of the Dred Scott decision all barriers had been thrown down, all restraint removed, and it needed but one further decision to make it unlawful for any State to exclude slavery. Whatever others thought, for Lincoln the hour had come to challenge this advance of slavery; and he felt himself to be the man for the hour.

Having thought the problem through from end to end, he began to write, following his curious custom of jotting down notes on bits of paper and depositing them in his hat. He was never a ready writer, like Herndon, least of all on an occasion such as this, when each word had to be carefully weighed in the balances of truth and propriety. Mr. Herndon divined what he was doing, but did not ask any question or make any suggestion. It was his speech accepting the nomination for the Senate; and when he began to transcribe it in orderly form he became more cheerful, but not more communicative. When he had finished the final draft of the speech, he locked the door of the office, drew the curtain across the glass panel in the door, and read it to Herndon, pausing at the end of each paragraph to await comment. Together they discussed the speech, sentence by sentence, though only the first paragraph, including the figure of the house divided against itself, caused any question. Often he had used it in office conversation, but never before in public, except at Bloomington in 1856, when Judge T. Lyle Dickey pronounced it a "d- fool utterance." Remembering that incident, Mr. Herndon remarked: