prairie schooner came forward, for the Westerner, used to camp meetings and excursions and visits that take a week at a time, prepared in like fashion for the debate. By noon the special trains arrived with the two debaters, and the followers of each combatant held processions, the one for Douglas being a mile long. Lincoln was driven to the scene in a gaily-decorated carriage led by a band carrying banners, some with guileless inscriptions which read, " Abe, the Giant-Killer," or "Edgar County for the Tall Sucker."

The debaters needed no introduction, and Douglas, who opened the debate, struck immediately at the vulnerable point of the Republican Party. He accused it of being revolutionary and sectional. The Westerner had no love for the Negro; he was not opposed to slavery in the old states, he did not want what he called the sacred rights of property to be violated by Abolitionism, or to share his land with free Negroes; he only wanted slavery to be excluded from the territories so that he could have the land himself. He wanted free homesteads and internal improvements. To say that the Republicans were black, meaning that they stood for political or social equality for the Negro, was a potent argument against it. Douglas used this manner of attack and Lincoln spent hours repudiating the charges. To an Abolitionist listening to the arguments of both men it was hard to choose between the two. Both denied that they would disturb slavery in the states, that they meant to attack the Southerners' rights to slaves, or that they would desire to see citizenship or social equality given to the Negro. But there was enough political difference between them to wreck the one party

and bring the other into power. No other documents or State papers are as important in giving the exact meaning of the issues involved at the time, and of Lincoln's position on the questions, as these speeches and debates.

"

Douglas had declared that he cared not whether slavery was voted up or voted down" as long as the principles of popular sovereignty were maintained. The Westerner and the Southerner cared very much whether slavery was voted into the free territories or not, each seeking a diametrically-opposed result. Lincoln insisted that he considered slavery a moral wrong, and that " though there is a physical difference between the two (the white and the black races) which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality . . . notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence -the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Lincoln reaffirmed his statement that a house divided against itself cannot stand. It did not mean a war upon the South, he said; it meant only a return to the principle upon which this government was founded, that slavery was to be ultimately extinguished. This was the meaning of the framers of the Constitution. This was their meaning in the prohibition of slavery in the new territories; this was the reason for the gradual abolition of the slave-trade. Henry Clay," he said, "my beau-ideal of a statesman, the man for whom I fought all my humble life-Henry Clay once said of a class of men who would repress

all tendencies to liberty and ultimate emancipation, that they must, if they would do this, go back to the era of our independence and muzzle the cannon which thunders its annual joyous return; they must blow out the moral lights around us; they must penetrate the human soul and eradicate there the love of liberty; and then and not till then could they perpetuate slavery in this country!"

Lincoln, placing himself squarely on the position that he was opposed to slavery, that it was inconsistent with the Declaration of Independence, that it was the purpose of the framers of the Constitution that it be extinguished, but that what he would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races, won for himself ultimately the West and most of the East.

Douglas maintained that there was no irrepressible conflict, and that the house was not divided against itself, for by local legislation the institution of slavery could be regulated for or against. To make him say openly that even a Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court did not mean the establishment of slavery, and that by local legislation unfavourable to it, it could be practically abolished, was Lincoln's main purpose in the debates. He succeeded in doing this, and Douglas became a lost leader South as well as West and East.

Lincoln harped so much on the Dred Scott decision that one Irishman called out, "Give us something besides Drid Scott!" But Lincoln drove the point home that there must be a "purpose strong as death and eternity for which he adheres to this decision, and