of which right Kansas had been deprived. Thus the popular mind has been thrown back upon itself as the original and the creator of the established order in which it lives.

Still in the Kansas conflict there was a point upon which both sides agreed, even if this agreement were largely unconscious: that was the legal right of the inhabitants to exclude slavery from their Territory. The Missourians when they seized by violence and fraud the Forms of Law, and used them in the interest of slavery, recognized the fact that the Kansans could employ them rightfully against slavery. Thus both sides acknowledged their validity and the struggle was, which side can get the Form and set it up as authority? So it came that one side exercised the legality without the right, and the other exercised the right without the legality. Both, however, impliedly agreed that the People of Kansas could vote down slavery.

(c) But now falls like a bomb into the midst of the contestants the Dred Scott decision declaring that neither the People nor Congress can exclude Slavery from the Territories according to the Constitution of the United States. Thus the Missourians did not really need to take the trouble of making their invasions, and of stealing the legal Forms; these already secured Slavery from the start. According to the Supreme Law of the land as interpreted by its highest Tribunal and

re-affirmed by the President of the United States,

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slavery exists in Kansas as much as in South Carolina or Georgia," from the very fact of its being the national domain, on which the property in slaves must be protected like any other property.

It is plain that out of this decision a new and deeper conflict has arisen in the North where a strong moral conviction of the wrongfulness of Slavery has taken hold of the People. But through the Supreme Court slavery has become the all-dominating institution of the land, overriding every sort of enactment in opposition, be it of the State or of the Nation. Thus the inner moral world of the Northern Folk-Soul has been drawn into the most grating dissonance with its outer institutional world, of which conflict we are now to behold the leading phases.

PART SECOND-THE UNION DISUNITED.

(1858–1861.)

During the present period the Nation was moving more decidedly toward Disunion than ever before or since. In the later Great War the mightier effort was in the other direction, toward the maintenance of the Union, even by force of arms. But now we are to witness an intermediate epoch of an emphatically separative character; the chasm between North and South, or between Free-States and Slave-States, starts to widening and deepening again after its apparent closing-up through the election of Buchanan. Hardly two years of his Administration had passed till it was everywhere felt in the land that a profounder disintegration had set in, which would end in complete dissolution unless arrested by an heroic remedy.

The anxious outlook of the time was voiced by (185)

one whom we now see to have been its greatest man, Abraham Lincoln. In a familiar adage he declares the situation to be this: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." The American Union is now such a house, "divided against itself," and in this condition it cannot last. By the lapse of years the expression seems trite enough, but it was a bold utterance for a public man when it was first spoken, and Douglas will fling it at him many times in the coming Illinois campaign for Senatorship. Even Lincoln's friends thought it impolitic, though it expresses what every thinking man of every party was pondering over in a kind of secret dread, so that nobody liked to hear it said outright in public.

But Lincoln does not leave us with this gloomy prospect of national dissolution and death. In the same paragraph of the same speech in which he employs the foregoing apothegm of separation (Springfield, June 16th, 1858), he rises to a prophetic outlook and gives a forecast of the final overcoming of the division, which, however, may happen in two very different ways. This ever-memorable passage runs as follows: "I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the

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opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States old as well as new, North as well as South."

Such is the opening or proem of the Lincoln part of the Ten Years' War which has been already going on three years. A prophetic utterance to whose fulfillment events are to whirl forward with a dizzying celerity; Lincoln has this element of prophecy in him which Douglas has not, the latter thinking that the Union must remain and ought to remain still half slave and half free. The People feel the truth of these words of the seer now taking the form of a stump-speaker, and respond with an open or often with a secret assent. In this statement Lincoln reads the Folk-Soul aright, and gives a voice to what is silently brooding there and seeking utterance. At this point Douglas fails to come into rhythm with the deepest throb of the popular heart; his ear is not attuned to the Aeolian whisperings of the World-Spirit. He says he does not care whether this Union be Slave-State producing or FreeState producing which is the thing about which everybody cares most and most, by the decree of the Gods.

has to care But Lincoln