Would you have gone out of the House, skulked the vote? I expect not. Richardson's resolutions, introduced before I made any move or gave any vote upon the subject, made the direct question of the justice of the war; so that no man can be silent if he would. You are compelled to speak, and your only alternative is to tell the truth or tell a lie."

He was against the war as unconstitutional; but twenty years later he emancipated the slaves with as little regard for the Constitution as did Polk in commencing this Mexican war. "The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress," he insists," was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions; and they resolved so to frame the Constitution that no man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter and places our President where kings have always stood."

Before the close of the war, when the probability of acquiring a large tract of land from Mexico became certain, the wrangle over the cause of the war ceased, and the question arose as to the form in which the new territory was to be admitted. Here the question of slavery jumped to the foreground again. As the whole war was prosecuted only for the extension of slavery, the North feared that the acquisition of new territory meant a still greater extension of slavery, and a proviso was brought in by Wilmot of Pennsylvania, which

said that an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the republic of Mexico to the United States was that "neither slavery nor voluntary servitude shall exist in any part of the said territory." The amendment was adopted and the Bill reported to the House. The Southern members, of course, made desperate efforts to kill the Bill, but they failed. However, it was sent to the Senate a few hours before the close of the session, and it lapsed without a vote.

When the war was really ended and the treaty of peace sent to the Senate, the subject took on new importance, and the Wilmot Proviso brought up again before the House no longer had the same success of the session before. The fight was kept up in the House in many forms during the entire session, and Lincoln used to say that he voted for the Wilmot Proviso about forty-two times. But if it ever gained any advantage in the House it was usually lost in the Senate, and no progress was made with the Proviso. The South was vigilant in regard to its institution of slavery. One man rose to censure the House because someone spoke of the institution of slavery as " peculiar." "Ours is the general system of the world," he said, "and the free system is the peculiar one." Another gentleman remarked that slavery was natural just as barbarism was natural, just as fig leaves and bear skins were a natural dress. It was the beginning of the new aggressive policy of the pro-slavery advocates.

Lincoln, before the close of the first session, made a peculiar stump-speech in Congress in favour of General Taylor, who was a member of the Whig Party, for the

Presidential election of 1848. Besides making this speech in Congress for Taylor he canvassed New England for him. Here, for the first time, the Lone Star of Illinois met the New England statesmen and politicians. He seems to have been very well received by the Whigs, but as again the Whigs had no platform, but based their campaign on personalities, his speeches were not very interesting. He attacked the newly-formed Free-Soil Party, the outgrowth of the Liberal Party. He did not see its significance, he could not see that before a generation should have waned it would blaze the way before him, and that in the Republican campaign of 1860 this party and not the Whigs, with whom he consorted now, would be his staff of support. In that future hour it was the New England Whigs who failed him, and it was the Free-Soil Party who gave their great vote to the Republican candidate of that year, who was to be no other than himself.

Lincoln's cautious, conservative friends had a more subduing effect on him than he knew. Except for his young law partner, Herndon, who was an ardent Abolitionist, he was surrounded by a conservative pro-slavery element, his wife and all her friends being Southern. He himself had the Southerner's distrust of the negro, though it was coupled with the Westerner's conception of democracy and justice. There was to be justice and democracy for the white man, and as for the negro, he was sorely puzzled about him. This much he knew, that slavery was unjust, and he went back to his second term of Congress and indulged in a little determined play of his own. He made no speeches on the popular questions of the hour, but

spent his time preparing a Bill for the gradual abolition of slavery in the district of Columbia. This was a measure which he knew would never have any immediate effect-in discussion it was generally laid on the table and was really brought in by members who had nothing better to say. In his case, it might have been more as an answer to Herndon than as a hope that he was saying something which would distinguish him in Congress. The Bill was not very radical, providing as it did for a temporary system of apprenticeship and eventual emancipation of children born of slave mothers after 1st January 1850. Moreover, the Bill endorsed the return of fugitive slaves. It met with the usual results. It was blocked by the South and never came to a vote.

Lincoln, who had gone to Congress with his wife and two children, returned from his political exploits depressed and sad. He had not made his mark with his own party, and his hope lay in getting some honourable position in the Government as a reward for his faithful service in the Whig campaign for General Taylor. Taylor was elected, and Lincoln made a journey to Washington in the hope of getting the post of Commissioner-General of the Land Office, which he heard would be given to a citizen of his state. He was not successful, but the position of Governor or Secretary of Oregon was offered him instead. He himself considered it favourably, but Mrs Lincoln was opposed to going out to such far territory, and he declined the offer. He came back to Springfield with a consciousness of failure. He had not won the glory in politics he had hoped for, he was without money and without a

definite post. He fell back, at forty, to the profession of a country lawyer, retreating into himself from his own immediate circle as he retreated from the world at large. They were crisis years, years of wandering in the desert, of bitterness and maladjustment, and yet withal of growth and regeneration.