it, but they could never be convinced that it was other than a "black, foul lie." They knew that "those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves, and under the rule of a just God cannot long retain it." But surely they would soon cease to deny it they would again begin to deserve it.

"The Union," he said, in view of the crisis in Kansas, "is undergoing a fearful strain; but it is a stout old ship, and has weathered many a hard blow, and the stars in their courses-ay, an invisible power greater than the puny efforts of men-will fight for us."

He warned his hearers against undertaking to accomplish more than they had actual strength for,— his watchword was a return to the safe lines of the

Missouri Compromise. And he warned them, also, against violence: ballots were stronger than bullets, and they must stand for great principles and Constitutional action, whatever the provocation of their antagonists. But he also uttered his warning to the party of violence and disunion arrayed against him, crying, "We won't go out of the Union and you shan't."

However wildly the delegates may have cheered and applauded Lincoln's words at Bloomington, his warnings and forebodings were little heeded at the moment in Springfield. Even in his own city, if his speech made him the leader of his party, he was not always able to command a following among a people used rather to flattering words and glowing promises. At first he lost many old political friends, and a meeting called early in June was attended only by his partner and one other. But Lincoln was not daunted;

he knew the apathy was only apparent; "While all seems dead the age itself is not. It liveth, as sure as our Maker liveth."

His appeal, at first apparently so unsuccessful, soon began to meet with a heartier response. During the canvass he seems to have made some fifty speeches, being urgently called from other parts of Illinois and from the neighbouring States to take a lead in the antumn campaign. He was busy, also, in the more personal labour of persuading individuals.

There were three three Presidential Candidates, the "Americans" or Know-nothings still retaining the support of a large section of the former Whig party. It was Lincoln's special anxiety to win over the leaders of this party in Illinois, proving by ingenious political arguments that their only chance of success. in the national election, lay in Illinois giving its vote against the Democrat, and that as the Know-nothings could not possibly carry the State, they could only secure this by supporting the Republican. He himself had been mentioned as a possible candidate for the vice-presidency, and in the Republican National Convention his name stood second among the favourites for that office; Dayton of New Jersey receiving 259 votes, to 110 recorded for Lincoln. Even on the second ballot a certain number of representatives from New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, had still supported him. When he read the account of this in the papers, he said at first, that he reckoned it was "another great man, in Massachusetts, named Lincoln;" but next day he seemed so much. abstracted and pre-occupied, that Mr Whitney who was with him at the time, came in later years to

L

believe that his serious thought of becoming President dated from this occasion.

When the poll was declared in November, the Democrats had succeeded in electing James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, who received 1,800,000 votes as against the Republican's 1,300,000, and the 900,000 given to the third candidate. It was a "moral defeat" for the Democrats; and the power shewn by the new party and its popular, impulsive candidate, Colonel Frémont, astonished the country.

Speaking at Chicago in December, Lincoln might well prophesy victory, if only all the men devoted to the charter of American liberties would sink their minor differences and unite together. Thus united they would re-inaugurate the central ideas of the Republic. And this they could accomplish; for, said he, "the human heart is with us, God is with us."

Chapter VII

The Great Issue

The Dred Scott Decision-Lincoln's Criticisms-Douglas versus Buchanan -A House Divided-Lincoln and Emancipation-The Debates with Douglas-Lincoln loses the Senatorship again.

IF Buchanan's election was a disappointment to Lincoln, it was something worse to Douglas, who had succeeded in preventing Buchanan's nomination four years earlier without receiving it himself, and had now been checkmated by his more successful rival.

The relations between these two men- the older, President, the younger, the trusted leader of the Democratic party-soon became more than strained. For in the spring of 1857, Buchanan hastened to endorse the revolutionary decision then given by the Supreme Court in the famous Dred Scott Case, which declared, amongst other matters, that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and that Congress could never prohibit, but must always protect, slavery in the Territories. This latter part of the decision made Douglas's position almost untenable. While it delighted the Southern Slavery party, it outraged the genuine residuum of feeling against ultra-slavery views in the hearts of Northern Democrats; for it asserted that the negro was not merely a slave, but sheer

property without individual rights before the law. Moreover it reduced the doctrine of popular sovereignty to a figment, by declaring that the nation was pledged to protect slave-property as such, wherever it might be carried by its owner.

Douglas argued indeed with extraordinary resource and ingenuity that though the decision was just and valid, yet it left his "great principle" intact: for the Congressional guarantee of slavery must remain a dead-letter wherever a Territorial legislature refused it the support of local slave-laws and regulations.

Lincoln, in his reply delivered at Springfield on the 26th June 1857, might have attacked Douglas's corollary, but he was for the moment more concerned with the enormity of the decision itself. In a noble passage, he compared the condition in which the negro found himself at the time of the Revolution, and his condition since the Dred Scott decision. "In those days our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and held to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal it is assailed and sneered at and construed, and hawked at and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not recognise it at all. All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him [the negro]. 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 with