"That," he said, "is really the point of all that argument of his."

The views of the two men on the economics of slave labor were irreconcilable. Douglas implied that to free the negro would be prejudicial to the white man. There is no proof that he ever made a serious study of the question. Nor is there proof that Lincoln investigated the subject at first hand and in detail. He raised the question at Cincinnati and maintained that Douglas's assumption was false. He held there was no necessary conflict between the white man and the negro, that there was "room enough for us all to be free," and that "the mass of white men are really injured by the effects of slavelabor in the vicinity of their own labor." He denied the assumption of some men that, among the laboring class, the condition of slaves was better than that of hired laborers. The condition of the hired laborer was superior because he had the ability to become an employer.1

Two weeks later, Lincoln, in an interesting and

I During the following year, 1860, in his Cooper Institute lecture, Lincoln mentions Helper's "The Impending Crisis," which he probably read soon after its appearance in 1857. It was the most elaborate study of the effects of slavery upon white labor available at the time. Lincoln's economic theory was never developed beyond the brief statements contained in his first annual message to Congress, his reply to a Committee of New York Workingmen, March 21, 1864, and in his letter to Colfax, April 4, 1865.

well-written address before the Wisconsin Agricultural Society, at Milwaukee, was able to state his views of labor and capital with greater clearness. He distinguished between the "mud-sill" theory held by those who assumed that the hired laborer, being "fatally fixed in that condition for life," was as bad off, or worse, than the slave, and the theory of those who, like himself, held "that labor is prior to, and independent of, capital-that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed; that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence they hold that labor is the superior-greatly the superior-of capital." He conceded that there was a "relation between labor and capital." A "few men own capital" and "hire or buy another few to labor for them," but a "large majority belong to neither class of hirers nor hired," men who "with their families

work for themselves . . . taking the whole product to themselves, and asking no favors" of capital or labor. Against the "old general rule . . . that educated people did not perform manual labor,” he described "the just, generous, and prosperous system" of a "prudent, penniless beginner in the world" who by labor acquires property for himself

and "at length hires another beginner to help him." With this system of "free labor," how could education be "most satisfactorily combined?" The "mud-sill" theory assumed "that labor and education are incompatible;" that the education of laborers was useless and dangerous, for the heads of laborers contained "explosive materials" to be kept as far as possible away "from that peculiar sort of fire which ignites them." On the other hand "the Author of man probably intended that heads and hands should coöperate as friends," that the head should direct and control the hands and the mouth "inseparably connected with it; and that being so, every head should be cultivated and improved by whatever will add to its capacity for performing its charge. In a word, free labor insists. on universal education."

In relation to agriculture, he believed that "booklearning is available." He advised a knowledge of botany and mechanics. "Chemistry assists in the analysis of soils, selection and application" of fertilizers, and in other ways. He advised intensive cultivation of the soil in preference to extensive farming. He looked upon education as "cultivated thought," best combined with "any labor, on the principle of thorough work;" and he looked forward

to the time when the "pressure of population would cause to be esteemed as the most valuable of all arts" that "of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of the soil. No community whose every member possesses this art, can ever be the victim of oppression in any of its forms. Such a community will be alike independent of crowned kings, money kings, and land kings."

Lincoln did not speak so much upon the technic of agriculture, for which he would not have been fitted, as upon the practical philosophy and civil significance of the art. He believed that a large farming population of free, intelligent people, tending constantly to become property owners, was a safeguard against political and economic tyranny. This was part and parcel of his ideals of democracy as against social privilege. The political obstacles to democracy he knew to be the more immediate and menacing. This he had indicated a few months before, in a rather brilliant letter in response to an invitation to attend, in Boston, a festival in honor of the birthday of Thomas Jefferson.1 "The principles of Jefferson," he said, "are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success.

I Letter to H. L. Pierce and others, April 6, 1859.

One dashingly calls them 'glittering generalities.' Another bluntly calls them 'self-evident lies.' And others insinuously argue that they apply to 'superior races. These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect-the supplanting of the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people. They are the vanguard, the miners and sappers of returning despotism. We must repulse them or they will subjugate us. This is a world of compensation, and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. If Lincoln had sought to unite his industrial and political philosophy in a single conception, perhaps he could not have given it a more splendid statement than he gave to the beautiful sentence with which he closed his highminded address at Milwaukee: 1

Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world beneath and around us, and the best intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity

I It is remarkable that Lincoln, in his Wisconsin address, spoke with such clearness upon the very aims in agriculture which were subsequently to be promoted by his Presidency, in the land grants of 1862, and later, in the establishment within the States of colleges of agriculture and mechanical arts.