sylvania was carried by a handsome majority for the administration.

If statesmanship is a practical science, to be tested by the touch-stone of enduring success, then is Lincoln entitled to a place among the world's great statesmen. He was not of the rulers who seek only to impress their own will on the nation. He was not of the rulers who play for mere place in the great game of politics.

As, in the first instance, tyrants are the selfish masters, so, in the other, demagogues are the selfish servants. But, above them, stand the men who have sought power to hold it as a sacred trust, and whose ambition and conduct are regulated by an ardent purpose to serve great national interests. It seems not too much to say that among these was Lincoln. He was pre-eminently a democratic ruler. Profoundly believing in a government of the people, by the people and for the people, however earnest his wish, as a man, to promote and enact justice. between classes and races, he never went faster nor further than to enforce the will of the people that elected him. His strength as a President lay in his deep sympathy with the people, "the plain folks," as he loved to call them, and his intuitive knowledge of all their thoughts and aims, their prejudices and preferences, equally and alike. He was elected to save the Union, not to destroy slavery; and

he did not aid, directly or indirectly, the movement to abolish slavery, until the voice of the people was heard demanding it in order that the Union. might be saved. He did not free the negro for the sake of the slave, but for the sake of the Union. It is an error to class him with the noble band of abolitionists to whom neither Church nor State was sacred when it sheltered slavery. He signed the proclamation of emancipation solely because it had become impossible to restore the Union with slavery.

Like the nation itself, Lincoln, although personally opposed to slavery, was but slowly educated into the belief that no republican civilization could endure with slavery as a corner-stone, or even as one of the pillars, of the Temple of Democracy. He believed that the spread of slavery should be resisted; for the Constitution did not contemplate its extension. He believed at one time that slavery should not be interfered with in the States that sustained it; for the Constitution, in fact, although not in words, had recognized its legality. It was not until slavery or the Union must be sacrificed that he became the emancipator of the negro race in America.

The Constitution, indeed, was the fetich of the pre-rebellion period of our history, and it commanded the loyal worship of nearly all the earlier statesmen of the republic.

It was not until the Southern politicians, growing more and more arrogant, passed, with the aid of their Northern allies, the Fugitive Slave Law, that the conscience of the North made itself felt as a political force; for, hitherto, it had been satisfied with moral and religious protests, or with silent lamentations over the impossibility of abolishing slavery under the Federal Constitution.

That act gave the death-blow to the Whig party. Out of its ashes arose the Republican party, which was organized solely to prevent the extension of slavery into virgin territory, but which was destined. to destroy it and subsequently to enfranchise the slaves whom it had emancipated.

Yet the Fugitive Slave Law did not arouse in Abraham Lincoln the profound indignation that he was afterward to transmute into emancipation.

The Fugitive Slave Law, by some oversight, had omitted the District of Columbia from its operations. On the 10th of January, 1849, in the 30th Congress, Abraham Lincoln offered a resolution to extend the Fugitive Slave Law over the District of Columbia!

It was for this act, when the news of his nomination for the presidency reached Massachusetts, that he was denounced by the greatest of American antislavery orators, Wendell Phillips, as "the Slave Hound of Illinois."

This proposition, however, was not presented in what might otherwise have well been regarded as its naked deformity. It was part of a bill, offered by the obscure congressman from Illinois, to provide for the gradual extinction of slavery in the District.

As this incident in the public life of Lincoln has been but slightly noticed, it may be well to put the entire record before the reader:

"January 8, 1849. At Second Session, 30th Congress, Mr. Lincoln voted against a motion to suspend the rules and take up the following:

Resolved: That the Committee on the Judiciary is hereby instructed to report a bill to the House, providing effectually for the apprehension and delivery of fugitives from Iowa who have escaped, or who may escape, from one State into another."

"January 13, 1849. Mr. Lincoln gave notice of a motion for leave to introduce a bill abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia by consent of the free white people of the District of Columbia, with compensation to owners.

"At Second Session, 30th Congress, January 10th, 1849, John Wentworth, of Illinois, introduced the following:

Whereas, The traffic now prosecuted in this metropolis of the Republic in human beings as

chattels is contrary to natural justice and the fundamental principles of our political system, and is notoriously a reproach to our country throughout Christendom, and a serious hinderance to the progress of republican liberty among the nations of the earth; therefore,

Resolved, That the Committee for the District of Columbia be instructed to report a bill, as soon as practicable, prohibiting the slave trade in said. District."

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Mr. Lincoln thereupon read an amendment which he intended to offer, if he could obtain the opportunity, as follows:

"That the Committee on the District of Columbia be instructed to report a bill in substance as follows:

SEC. 1. Be it enacted, etc., That no person not now within the District of Columbia, nor now owned by any person or persons now resident within it, nor hereafter born within it, shall ever be held in slavery within said District.

"SEC. 2. That no person now within said District, or now owned by any person or persons now resident within the same, or hereafter born within it, shall ever be held in slavery within the limits of said District.

"Provided, That officers of the Government of