The Republicans in Congress are grinding off the flesh from their knee caps, attempting to convince the Southern men that we are cowards. We are cowards, that is, our Representatives are. But here, friend, if a man makes me bite the dust to get what is my due, or to get a favor, when I do arise from my humiliation I rise with clenched fists, hitting my tyrant with a quick back-slap. This is the law of our nature, and look out, distant in the future, for this law in its application. I feel like I wanted to scorch off the disgrace of our kneeling, whining cowardice. The people must be educated.

The South is now catechizing the North. To this question, "What is the true end of man?" it stands and shiveringly answers, "The chief end of man is to support the nigger institution, and to apologize to despots!" I might turn out to be a coward, if I were in Congress: but I think, if I were asked that question, I should say, "Resistance to nigger-drivers-individual tyrants-is fealty to man and obedience to God." The Senators are all on their knees. So are the Representatives. Let them shrive themselves there, and mankind will avenge the humiliation in the future. This is God's constant mode of operation. The race will pull the trigger which the individual refused to touch. God will cry to the race, "Fire," and it will fire. We will then apologize upward.

Senator Douglas is backing down to the command of the slave driver, and Kellogg, of Illinois, is after Greeley and Douglas for their conspiracy to beat Lincoln. Let the facts come. Human history is a great magnet held up and swung over facts, drawing them up, sticking them logically amidst the world's great and small events. Garrison, I fear, is not doing much. He is, however, always firm, and as you once said to me, "I have no more fear of Garrison than of the shrinkage of the world's granite ribs, holding us up." The North is gradually being educated in ideas and in arms. Instinct and nature drive them to prepare. I want peace; but if God says otherwise "so mote it be." Are you writing your great book in Rome? How are you and how does old Rome look? I hope you are well.

Your friend,

IV

W. H. HERNDON.

On February 25, 1860, Lincoln arrived in New York City to deliver his speech at the Cooper Institute. It was Saturday,

and he spent the whole day in revising and retouching his address, for he was a believer in the inspiration of last moments. On the Sabbath he attended worship at Plymouth Church, and after the sermon dined with Henry Ward Beecher at the house of a friend.1 While walking alone in the afternoon he looked in upon a mission Sunday-school where he was invited to talk to the children who, whenever he made a movement to stop cried out, "Go on! Oh, do go on!" As he rose to depart, the leader, asking the name of his visitor, was surprised to hear the answer, "Abraham Lincoln of Illinois." 2 On Monday he wandered about the city to see the sights, and in a book-store, where he stopped to get a book ordered by Herndon, he met George Bancroft. When the committee waited upon him to escort him to the Institute, they found him dressed in a sleek and shining suit of new black, creased and wrinkled from having been packed too closely and too long in his little valise. Whether he was more abashed by his new surroundings or his mussed suit, it was hard to tell.

When he reached the Institute he faced "the intellect and culture" of the city, as the Tribune said, David Dudley Field escorting him to the platform, where William Cullen Bryant presided. Horace Greeley, former Governor King, and other notable men sat beside him. For the first few moments, as he afterwards said, he was sure that nobody saw anything but the wrinkles in his clothes, and his recalcitrant coat collar which flew up every time he made a gesture. But he soon forgot himself and his address was, as well in its character as in its results, one of the most important of his career- though some still agree with the orator himself that his speech at Peoria, in 1854, was his best. Owing to a heavy snow-storm the Cooper Institute was not full, and the audience was so busy

1 Life of Beecher, by J. H. Barrows, pp. 245-6. After the Cooper Institute address the following evening, Lincoln was Beecher's candidate for the Presidency. - Henry Ward Beecher, by Lyman Abbott, p. 222 (1903). It may be added that the story, so often told, that Lincoln spent a night with Beecher in his home during the dark days of the war, is a legend.

2 Life of Lincoln, by J. G. Holland, p. 213 (1866).

taking his measure that it quite forgot to applaud. Lincoln had foreseen this, and his address was a calm, lucid, searching survey of the great issue in all its branches, intended to appeal to the mind of educated man whose interest was keenly alive.1 As such it was a model, thorough without affectation of learning, exact without the usual stiffness of dates and details, often compressing into a single plain and simple sentence the thought and research of years.

For his text he chose the words of Senator Douglas: "Our fathers, when they framed the government under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now." Since all indorsed these words, his inquiry was as to what understanding the fathers had of the slavery issue, how they dealt with it, and what they meant should be the end of it. Then followed an elaborate historical argument, which amounted to a demonstration, showing that the fathers regarded slavery as a wrong and had placed it, as they thought, in course of ultimate extinction. Seldom has there been a more lucid exegesis of the Constitution or a more effective application of its principles and spirit to the affairs of a later time. Nor has there ever been a more earnest exhortation to the nation to return to the landmarks set up by the fathers of the republic.

Let all 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

1 For the story of this speech, and the speech itself with valuable notes carefully edited, see Abraham Lincoln, by G. H. Putman (1909). Mr. Horace White remarks: "I chanced to open the other day his Cooper Institute speech. This is one of the few printed speeches that I did not hear him deliver in person. As I read the concluding pages of that speech the conflict of opinion that preceded the conflict of arms then sweeping upon the country like an approaching solar eclipse, seemed prefigured like a chapter of the Book of Fate."— Lincoln in 1854, pp. 21-22 (1908). Greeley said that he never listened to a greater speech, although he had heard several of Webster's best.

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. All they (the South) ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace and in harmony, one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the Southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them, if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. 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.

Here was the conciliatory spirit of the Henry Clay Whig, a lover of the Union willing to compromise everything except the moral wrong of slavery; not the Abolitionist, still less an advocate of a mystical "higher law." As has been true of all great reformers, at least in the earlier stages of their careers, his ideals were more frequently in the past than in the future, and he made plea for a pruning of gross abuses, a reverting to the healthy simplicity of by-gone times. Like Shibli Bagarang in the George Meredith story of The Shaving of Shagpat published in 1856-he proposed a friendly and conservative shave of the Slave Despot. True to the nature of tyranny, the Slave Power waxed exceeding angry, until its face was as red as a berry in a bush; but when at last Shagpat had to be thoroughly and radically shaved, our Shibli was equal to the task.

The New York papers printed the speech in full, Bryant, of the Evening Post, expressing the wish that he had more material so interesting with which to fill his columns. Tribune, as it explained, omitted only "the tones, the gestures, the kindling eye and the mirth-provoking look" - which is news, indeed, for in its printed form there is no glint of mirth. In his speeches in New England, whither he went to visit his son Robert, then at Phillips Exeter Academy, he improvised at

the moment on the theme of the Cooper Institute address, with repeated emphasis upon the fact that John Brown was not a Republican, but a lonely, misguided enthusiast. He mixed a deal of inelegant anecdote with dashes of local color, especially at Hartford where he was induced to take sides in a strike then in progress in the local shoe factories; and it was like him to take the side of the workers.1 On the whole, such scraps as remain of his speeches made on this tour reconcile us to the fact that they were not reported in full.

But he was now, in a very real sense, a national figure. Men were inquiring about him, and his Illinois friends urged him to give the word and let them set to work for his nomination for the Presidency. "What's the use of talking about me whilst we have such men as Seward, Chase, and others?" he said to Jesse Fell, who sought data for a biography. Finally he admitted that he would like to be President, "but there is no such good luck in store for me," he said. "Besides, there is nothing in my early history that would interest you or anybody else." Fell pleaded, and for his benefit Lincoln wrote that remarkable "Autobiography," describing himself as derived from one of the "second families," and his story as a 1 Surely the superlative absurdity is the attempt to make Lincoln appear in the guise of a Socialist. Even his prediction about the danger to the country from the power of "corporations" and capitalists, rests upon a hypothetical letter which has not been produced- though, in view of the inflated values and wild extravagance of war times, he would have been justified in making it. — Social and Industrial Conditions During the War, by E. D. Fite (1910). Carl Marx divined in him a "singleminded son of toil" who, in any contest between man and dollars, would take the side of men. - Life of Marx, by J. Spargo, p. 225 (1910). But Socialists have no monopoly of that feeling. Lincoln's words about the rights of property, and capital, make ridiculous the effort of that cult to claim him. He looked forward to the time when no slave would return to unrequited toil, and each family would own its own homestead, subject to no lien, except taxes.- Abraham Lincoln, by R. H. Browne, Vol. II, p. 638 (1907). His vigorous individualism was, however, always balanced by a feeling of human solidarity, and both were transfigured by that social imagination, so marked a trait in him, out of which was born his mystical and prophetic vision of the union. — Abraham Lincoln, by H. B. Binns, pp. 144, 352 (1907).