OF SLAVERY.

THE present generation of Americans can hardly obtain a correct idea of the difficulties attending the position of an anti-slavery man during the years immediately preceding the civil war.

The most moderate opponents of the existing order of things were sure to be misunderstood and misrepresented. The very nature of the institution itself compelled it to be aggressive. Unless it could continually grow, it must die, like a plant attaining its maturity. The unreasoning bitterness of the political conflict which was waged on behalf of it finds its best index in the fact of the civil war itself.

Mr.

Lincoln's own aversion to slavery began in his youth and grew with his growth, but he at no time refused to see and acknowledge every, justice belonging, in law or in equity. to the people of the southern States. While he was always in advance of the great mass of his fellow-citizens, and even of his own party, he was never a zealot, never incapable of appreciating the inherited views and interests of his adversaries.

In his perception, justice to all, the best good of all, white men or colored, demanded the preservation of the national integrity, in one government of one country. To this all other considerations were secondary, for it contained the future as well as the present, and for this every imaginable sacrifice of treasure, of suffering and of life itself, was to be freely made. To this central thought and purpose,

therefore, all his utterances concerning the colored race, their bondage or their emancipation, can be readily adjusted.

SPEECH AT SPRINGFIELD, JUNE, 1857.

"In those days, our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it. All the powers of the earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him; ambition follows; philosophy follows; and the theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison-house; they have searched his person and left no prying instrument with him. One after another,

they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him, as it were, bolted in, with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the consent of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is."

SPEECH AT QUINCY, ILL., OCT. 13, 1858.

"We have in this nation this element of domestic slavery. It is an absolute certainty that it is a disturbing element. It is the opinion of all the great men who have expressed an opinion upon it, that it is a dangerous element. We keep up a controversy in regard to it.

That controversy necessarily springs from difference of opinion, and if we can learn exactly-can reduce to the lowest elements-what that difference of opinion is, we shall be better prepared for discussing the different systems of policy that we would propose in regard to that disturbing element. I suggest that the difference of opinion, reduced to its lowest terms, is no other than the difference between the men who think slavery a wrong and those who do not think it wrong."

SPEECH AT PEORIA, ILL., OCT. 16, 1858. "The doctrine of self-government is right, absolutely and eternally right, but it has no just application as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such just application, depends upon whether a negro is not, or is a man. If he is not a man, in that