vantage over his opponent in being able to state those objections frankly, for Judge Douglas neither denounced nor defended slavery as an institution-his plan embodied a compromise, and he could not discuss slavery upon its merits without alienating either the slave-owner or the abolitionist. Brevity is the soul of wit, and a part of Lincoln's reputation for wit lies in his ability to condense a great deal into a few words. He was epigrammatic. A moulder of thought is not necessarily an originator of the thought moulded. Just as lead, moulded into the form of bullets, has its effectiveness increased, so thought may have its propagating power enormously increased by being moulded into a form that the eye catches and the memory holds. Lincoln was the spokesman of his party-he gave felicitous expression to the thoughts of his followers.

His Gettysburg speech is not surpassed, if equalled, in beauty, simplicity, force, and appropriateness by any speech of the same length of any language. It is the world's model in eloquence, elegance, and condensation. He might safely rest his reputation as an orator on that speech alone.

He was apt in illustration-no one more so. A simple story or simile drawn from everyday life flashed before his hearers the argument that he wanted to present. He did not speak over the heads of his hearers, and yet his language was never commonplace. There is strength in simplicity, and Lincoln's style was simplicity itself.

He understood the power of the interrogatory, for some of his most powerful arguments were condensed into questions. Of all those who discussed the evils of separation and the advantages to be derived from the preservation of the Union, no one ever put the matter more forcibly than Lincoln did when, referring to the possibility of war and the certainty of peace some time, even if the Union was divided, he called attention to the fact that the same question would have to be dealt with, and then asked, "Can enemies make treaties easier than friends can make laws?"

He made frequent use of Bible language and of illustrations drawn from Holy Writ. It is said that when he was

preparing his Springfield speech of 1858 he spent hours trying to find language that would express the idea that dominated his entire career, namely, that a Republic could not permanently endure half free and half slave; and that finally a Bible passage flashed through his mind, and he exclaimed, "I have found it"-"If a house be divided against itself, that house can not stand," and probably no other Bible passage ever exerted as much influence as this one in the settlement of a great controversy.

I have enumerated some-not all, but the more important -of his characteristics as an orator, and on this day I venture for the moment to turn the thoughts of this audience away from the great work that he accomplished as a patriot, away from his achievements in the line of statecraft, to the means employed by him to bring before the public the ideas which attracted attention to him. His power as a public speaker was the foundation of his success, and while it is obscured by the superstructure that was reared upon it, it can not be entirely overlooked as the returning anniversary of his birth calls increasing attention to the widening influence of his work. With no military career to dazzle the eye or excite the imagination; with no public service to make his name familiar to the reading public, his elevation to the presidency would have been impossible without his oratory. The eloquence of Demosthenes and Cicero were no more necessary to their work, and Lincoln deserves to have his name written on the scroll with theirs.

LINCOLN AS FRANCE SAW HIM

HON. JEAN ADRIEN JUSSERAND

N two tragic occasions, at a century's distance, the fate

a free nation? would it continue to be one nation? A leader was wanted on both occasions, a very different one in each case. This boon from above was granted to the American people, who had a Washington when a Washington was needed, and a Lincoln when a Lincoln could save them. Both had enemies, both had doubters, but both were recognized by all open-minded people, and above all by the nation at large, as the men to shape the nation's destinies.

When the Marquis de Chastellux came to America as chief of the staff in the Army of Rochambeau, his first thought was to go to see his friend La Fayette, and at the same time Washington. He has noted in his "Mémoires" what were, on first sight, his impressions of the not yet victorious, not yet triumphant, not yet universally admired American patriot. "I saw," he said, "M. de La Fayette talking in the yard with a tall man of five feet nine inches, of noble mien and sweet face. It was the General himself. I dismounted and soon felt myself at my ease by the side of the greatest and best of all men. All who meet him trust him; but no one is familiar with him, because the sentiment he inspires in all has ever the same cause a profound esteem for his virtues, and the highest opinion of his talents." So wrote a foreigner who was not La Fayette, who suddenly found himself face to face with the great man. Any chance comer, any passer-by would have been similarly impressed. He inspired confidence, and those who saw him felt that the fate of the country was in safe hands.

Nearly a century of gradually increasing prosperity had

elapsed when came the hour of the nation's second trial. Though it may seem to us a small matter compared with what we have seen since, the development had been considerable; the scattered colonies of yore had become a great nation; yet now it seemed as if all was again in doubt. The nation was young, wealthy, powerful, prosperous; it had immense domains and resources; yet it seemed that her fate was doomed to parallel those of the old empires described by Tacitus, and by Raleigh after him, which, without foes, crumble to pieces under their own weight. Within her own frontiers, elements of destruction or disruption had been growing; hatreds were engendered between people equally brave, bold, and sure of their rights. The edifice raised by Washington was shaking on its base; a catastrophe was at hand. Then it was that in a middle-sized, not yet world-famous town-Chicago by name -the Republican Convention, called there for the first time, met to choose a candidate for the presidency. It has met there again since and has made, each time, a remarkable choice. In 1860 it chose a man whom my predecessor of those days, announcing the news to his Government, described as "a man almost unknown, Mr. Abraham Lincoln." Almost unknown was he indeed, at home as well as abroad, and the news of his election was received with anxiety.

My country, France, was then governed by Napoleon III; all liberals had their eyes fixed on America. Your example was the great example which gave heart to our most progressive men. You had proved that Republican government was possible, by having one. If it broke to pieces, so would the hopes of all those among us who expected that one day we should have done the same. And the partisans of autocracy were loud in their assertion that a Republic was well and good for a country without enemies or neighbors; but that if a storm arose, it would be shattered. A storm had arisen, and the helm had been placed in the hands of that "man almost unknown, Mr. Abraham Lincoln."

"We still remember," wrote years later the illustrious French writer, Prévost-Paradol, "the uneasiness with which we awaited the first words of that President, then unknown, upon whom a heavy task had fallen,

and from whose advent to power might be dated the ruin or regeneration of his country. All we knew was that he had sprung from the humblest walks of life, that his youth had been spent in manual labor; that he had risen by degrees in his town, in his county, and in his State. What was this favorite of the people? Democratic societies are liable to errors which are fatal to them. But as soon as Mr. Lincoln arrived in Washington, as soon as he spoke, all our doubts and fears were dissipated; and it seemed to us that fate itself had pronounced in favor of the good cause, since, in such an emergency, it had given to the country an honest man.”

For Prévost-Paradol and for millions of others, the first words-the now famous Inaugural Address-had been what a first glance at Washington was for Chastellux, a revelation that the man was a Man, a great and honest one, and that once more the fate of the country, at an awful period, had been placed in safe hands.

Well indeed might people have wondered and felt anxious when they remembered how little training in great affairs the new ruler had had, and the incredible difficulty of the problems he would have to solve to solve, his heart bleeding at the very thought, for he had to fight-not enemies, but friends. ("We must not be enemies.")

No romance of adventure reads more like a romance than the true story of Lincoln's youth, and of the wanderings of his family from Virginia to Kentucky, from Kentucky to Indiana, from Indiana to the newly-formed State of Illinois; having first to clear a part of the forest, then to build a doorless, windowless cabin, with one room for all the uses of them all; the whole family leading the sort of a life in comparison with which that of Robinson Crusoe was one of sybaritic enjoyment. That in those trackless, neighborless, bookless parts of the country, under such conditions, Lincoln-the grandson of a man killed by the Indians, the son of a father who never succeeded in anything, and whose utmost literary accomplishment consisted in signing with the greatest difficulty his own name (an accomplishment he had in common with the father of Shakespeare)-could learn, could educate himself, was the first great wonder of his life. It showed once more that learn