The People.

After this comic interlude, the People turn back into their serious vein, which always at the present time springs from some phase of the slavery question. The subject becomes intolerably wearisome on account of its never-failing presence in talk and writ; but it cannot be banished, cannot be crushed out, being the very theme and thought of the Folk-Soul in which every individual of the land participates. The impress of the Spirit of the Age cannot be wiped out of the brain of any rational man at will; there is no flight from the task of the time without a self-undoing.

1. In Kansas the moral element arose and was active, but it did not there reach its deepest tension. Her people had before them the problem of making Kansas, this particular Territory, a Free-State; beyond such immediate end the majority of them, being Douglas Democrats, and believing in Popular Sovereignty, hardly looked. But when the Kansas question passed outside the limits of Kansas and entered the Northern States, it deepened to the thought of making all the Territories into Free-States. There was no reason why Kansas should be an exception; in fact, it was only a special instance of the general

principle of Free-Stateism, which had now become conscious in the mind of the People. Such, indeed, was the chief fruit of the training which the North underwent through the grand Kansas discipline.

The doctrine of the exclusion of slavery from the Territories had already been enounced in the platform of the Republican party in 1856. The - Dred Scott decision, however, declared the doctrine unconstitutional, and thus started a new and deeper questioning in the Folk-Soul of the North. What shall we do with our palladium of liberty, the Constitution, which we have so long loved and adored, if it makes slavery universal- not only nationalizes it but universalizes it, compelling the Union to be productive of Slave-States only? In some way that decision must be reversed- but in what way? That is indeed the problem which time is to solve, and toward this solution the movement now starts. Slavery is declared to be the universal law of the land, all enactments and constitutions of the single States to the contrary notwithstanding; Judge Táney has made the law, usurping or at least supplanting the legislative function. This drives mightly against the moral conviction of the North; the result is the conflict between the moral and the institutional in man, a conflict deeper and more desperate in its outcome than that of Kansas.

2. After these abstract statements, it will be well to glance at the great leaders of this rising movement, who are also aspirant's for the Chief Magistracy of the Nation. In whom does the growing conviction of the Northern Folk-Soul most adequately incorporate itself? Now is the time for the hero to appear.

were.

It is to be marked that Douglas voted against the English bill with the Republicans. He was now at the nearest point of his sweep toward Republicanism, in the middle of the bridge, as it He had quit defending the formal wrong, though he had not yet asserted the informal right. Will he go over? Both sides watched him with most intense interest. The inner circle of the South had come to hate him worse than they did Seward; he had divided their party and threatened their domination. Certain Republicans were getting their throats ready to hail him as a leader. Some New York newspapers began to forecast the new party, accepting his Popular Sovereignty and reverberating his name through the land as the coming Northern candidate for President in 1860. But he still has a little stretch of bridge to cross before he can reach the Republican hosts. Will he stop, turn back, or go on?

It is evident that Seward felt his chances for the coming prize to be jeoparded. He began to separate from his associates in the Senate, and voted against them on the Army bill and with the

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Administration, saying I care nothing for party." He gave as his reason for his vote: this battle is already fought; it is over. "We are fighting for a majority of Free States; they are already sixteen to fifteen, and before one year we shall be nineteen to fifteen." Here we catch a glimpse of Seward's view of the conflict: Which side shall dominate the Nation? So also the South conceived it. Seward likewise spoke favorably of Popular Sovereignty in his speech on the Lecompton affair. Clearly he is leading off somewhither; what is his motive? Certainly a breach is threatening the Republican party as well as the Democratic.

Both Douglas and Seward seem to be breaking from their old connections, and to be forming an independent following of their own. Could Seward be seeking to ingratiate himself with the Administration which so hated Douglas? There was maneuvering between these two astute politicians for the right position, which might be the key to 1860. But Douglas had a nearer motive: the election of an Illinois legislature this very fall (1858) to return him to the Senate. Illinois had shown a tendency recently to go Republican. His success was doubtful without Republican support. He had already won influential Republican newspapers and politicians in the East to favor his re-election to the Senatorship.

Seward called Douglas slippery, but Seward

was open to the same charge. Both were patriots at bottom, yet both were politicians, deeply versed in what is often called practical polities. Park. ably neither was personally corrupt in the use of money, but they had friends who were not so tender-conscienced, and at whose deings they connived. Both changed, shifted positions, and readjusted themselves to catch the direction of the popular breeze. Some excuse may be found in the fact that their time was a time of transition and of dissolution of parties, when everybody had to make a new alignment. Neither of them was a rigid moralist as to political means: both would probably say with Cassius: - In such a time as this it is not meet that every nice offense should bear his comment."*

At this point when both parties and both their chief leaders seem to be balancing in a kind of equilibrium uncertain of their way, the man of destiny, Abraham Lincoln, appears and is soon to overtop both Douglas and Seward. Here we may emphasize by contrast his straightforwardness, which the popular mind caught up first of all, giving to him the title of Honest Abe, which title men never gave to Seward or Douglas, though they were not dishonest men, and though Lincoln too had his secrecies and subtleties.

The first struggle of the new issue before the People is to take place in the West on the soil of Clinois between Lincoin and Douglas, the two