From photograph by Brady. The debate with Douglas in 1858 had given Lincoln a national reputation, and the following year he received many invitations to lecture. One came from a young men's Republican club in New York. Lincoln consented, and in February, 1860 (about three months before his nomination for the presidency), delivered what is known, from the hall in which it was delivered, as the "Cooper Institute speech." While in New York he was taken by the committee of entertainment to Brady's gallery, and sat for the portrait_reproduced above. It was a frequent remark with Lincoln that this portrait and the Cooper Institute speech made him President.

majority of them "certainly understood that no proper division of local from Federal authority nor any part of the Constitution forbade the Federal Government to control slavery in the Federal territories." Not only did he show this of the thirty-nine framers of the original Constitution, but he defied anybody to show that one of the seventy-six members of the Congress which framed the amendments to the Constitution ever held any such view.

"Let all," he said, "who believe that 'our fathers who framed the government under which we live understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now,' speak as they spoke, and act as they acted upon it. This is all Republicans ask-all Republicans desire-in relation to slavery. As those fathers marked it, so let it be again marked, as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity. Let all the guaranties those fathers gave it be not grudgingly, but fully and fairly, maintained. For this Republicans contend, and with this, so far as I know or believe, they will be content."

One after another he took up and replied to the charges the South was making against the North at the moment:-Sectionalism, radicalism, giving undue prominence to the slave question, stirring up insurrection among slaves, refusing to allow constitutional rights, and to each he had an unimpassioned answer impregnable with facts.

The discourse was ended with what Lincoln felt to be a precise statement of the opinion of the question on both sides, and of the duty of the Republican

Party under the circumstances. This portion of his address is one of the finest early examples of that simple and convincing style in which most of his later public documents were written.

"If slavery is right," he said, "all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality-its universality; if it is wrong, they 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. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition as being right; but thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our

votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this? "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 be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored-contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong: vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of 'don't care' on a question about which all true men do care; such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said and undo what Washington did.

"Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. 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 New York Lincoln went to Providence, R. I., where he spoke on the evening of February 28th and from there on to New Hampshire to visit his son Robert, then at Phillips Exeter Academy. His coming was known only a short time before he arrived and hurried arrangements were made for him to speak at Concord, Manchester, Exeter and Dover. At Concord the address was made in the afternoon on only a few hours' notice; nevertheless, he had a great audience, so eager were men at the time to hear anybody who had serious arguments on the slavery question. Something of the impression Lincoln made in New Hampshire may be gathered from the following article, "Mr. Lincoln in New Hampshire," which appeared in the Boston "Atlas and Bee" for March

5:

"The Concord "Statesman' says that notwithstanding the rain of Thursday, rendering travelling very inconvenient, the largest hall in that city was crowded to hear Mr. Lincoln. The editor says it was one of the most powerful, logical and compact speeches to which it was ever our fortune to listen; an argument against the system of slavery, and in defence of the position of the Republican Party, from the deductions of which no reasonable man could possibly escape. He fortified every position assumed, by proofs which it is impossible to gainsay; and while his speech was at intervals enlivened by remarks which elicited applause at the expense of the Democratic Party, there was, nevertheless,