to-day. At Peoria he said: "What I do say is that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent. . . The master not only governs the slave without his consent, but he governs him by a set of rules altogether different from those which he prescribes for himself. Allow all the governed an equal voice in the government, and that, and that only, is self-government." This complete description of responsible government required a great struggle to make it a fact. It is interesting to compare Lincoln's dictum with that of a great English statesman of the mediæval age, prophetic of British democracy of a later time: "What concerns all should by all be approved." days it reminds one also of Immanuel Kant's definition of "constitutional freedom, as the right of every citizen to have to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent or approval,' a definition of which his own countrymen as yet are ignorant or are powerless to enjoy. The case of Belgium and certain other countries strikingly call to mind Kant's corollary proposition: "No State shall intermeddle by force with the constitution or

In these

"2

I Edward I: Quod tangit omnes, ab omnibus comprebetur. Translated above.

2 "Essay on Eternal Peace," translated by Hastic, Boston edn., p. 137.

1

government of another State." We shall see, in the next chapter, how Lincoln, in debate with Douglas, extended his conception of the democratic principle by a telling exposition of absolutism.

Meantime it is important to sketch the story of his great utterances and the character of their content as they lead up to that point. The closely reasoned argument of the Peoria speech drove the oratory of Douglas to cover. The senator asked and received from Lincoln an agreement that neither of them should make another speech during the campaign. Lincoln (who alone did not violate the agreement) had shown his capacity to burrow deeper than his opponent, to reason from principle rather than from expediency, and he disclosed the fact that he did not go before the public without having mastered the history of the question in debate. Unlike the method of Douglas, he gave piquancy also to what he said by the use of apt quotation and literary allusion. In this characteristic he was never pedantic, but apparently spontaneous. The effect was an appropriate reinforcement of the facts and statements he employed. The Peoria speech exhibits no notable literary content beyond a sound analysis of the points in controversy.

I Ibid., p. 73.

It shows a wider reading, however, than any of Douglas's speeches revealed. From Pope's Essay on Man he employed the familiar aphorism, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." From Hamlet he used the line, "It hath [has] no relish of salvation in it." Macbeth supplied him with "Cancel and tear in [into] pieces," and "bloody hand" is embedded in a well-conceived allusion to the Macbeth incident of the murder of Duncan.1 Two para

graphs before, he adapts biblical phraseology to the national dishonor of slavery: "Our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white in the spirit, if not in the blood, of the Revolution." 2 He uses the metaphors "Behemoth of danger" and "Genius of Discord," biblical and classical allusions respectively, easily identified. He adapts Wendell Phillips's words about Napoleon in characterizing the Nebraska act as "grand, gloomy, and peculiar.' indicates his dictionary habit by quoting Webster's definition of the verb "to compromise," uses scriptural language frequently, quotes from the Declaration of Independence, and accepts Douglas's challenge to explicate the slavery question by reference to the attitude of the Revolutionary fathers.3 This I Macbeth, II. 2; V. 1. 2 Revelation, 7:14. 3 Extract from Peoria speech, Page 222, Appendix.

He

same challenge formed a part of his discussion six years afterward in the Cooper Institute Address.

In connection with the Peoria speech, Lincoln's letters to George Robertson, August 15, 1855,1 and to Joshua Speed, August 24 of the same year,2 are of interest. The first indicates the country's abandonment of the spirit of the Fathers toward peaceful emancipation, the method Lincoln espoused. It points out the fixed temper of the advocates of slavery, and defines the paramount political problem of the time: "Can we as a nation continue together permanently-forever-half slave and half free? The problem," he writes, "is too mighty for me. May God in his mercy superintend the solution." Months before this letter, this root idea of Lincoln's analysis of the slavery problem was engendering in his mind. Traveling the circuit after the Peoria address, Lincoln on one occasion occupied a room with Judge Dickey. Before retiring they had sat up late discussing the slavery question. The judge woke up early the next morning and found Lincoln "half sitting up in bed." "Dickey," he said, "I tell you this nation cannot exist half slave and half free." "Oh, Lincoln," said I, "go to sleep." Lincoln was bringing to birth the funda1 Page 298, Appendix. 2 Page 300, Appendix.

3 Tarbell, I:288.

mental proposition which in three years was to take on the final and startling form he gave it in the first paragraph of the celebrated Springfield speech.

The second letter makes it clear that Lincoln had reached a philosophical understanding of what in the average man aroused but little more than a predisposition to one side or the other, unaccompanied by thorough-going conviction or clear insight. To many at the time he gave the impression of unsafe radicalism. Possibly there were those who regarded him as touched with the spirit of fanaticism they were accustomed to associate with over-ardent reformers. To us, at this distance, he seems, rather, to have possessed a clear discernment of the ethical forces ever active in human nature and civilization whereby the race is pulled upward. He grasped the infinite spiritual dissonance of one man's, or set of men's, assumption of control over another for selfish purposes. How could one man, he reasoned, by presuming to own another as property, regard himself as superior to the other in a commonwealth which presupposed the equality of all men and in which public opinion was the totality of all men's viewpoints?

"Our government," he said, after the Buchanan election in 1856, "rests in public opinion. Whoever