more trouble than Sumner, Seward, Chase, or any of the men he had met on the floor of the Senate. They had agreed to debate at another meeting near by, but the debate did not take place. On the contrary, to the surprise of their followers, they parted, each going to his home. Douglas may have cried enough and begged off on account of ill health, as it is asserted he did; but there is no record by which to solve the mystery of the sudden ending of the campaign.

Lincoln's side won in the election, but he failed to be chosen Senator because a few anti-Douglas Democrats in the Legislature refused to vote for a Whig. He yielded to them and gave the election to Lyman Trumbull, an able member of their party, who was not less zealous than himself in opposing slavery in the territories.

Though defeated, he did not lower the standard which he had raised. Every event justified his belief that the crisis had come. Under the lead of Douglas, Congress had left the question of slavery to be decided by the settlers on the plains, and Kansas became a bloody battleground between armed men, who rushed in from the North and from the South and who debated the problem with knives and rifles and the torch. Rival settlements and governments of Northerners and Southerners were broken

up and destroyed in a war of extermination almost as savage as any that had ravaged the land when tribes of red men fought for the possession of it. Indeed, white women fled with their children to the protection of the Indians.

When the campaign for the election of President came in 1856, the Whig party was a wreck. Lincoln joined the organization which rose on its ruins and became a Republican. He was welcomed at the State Convention of the new party as its natural leader. There, speaking for the first time as a Republican, the great cause in which his whole soul was enlisted moved him to deliver an address of such wonderful power that even the press reporters forgot their duty as they sat bound in its spell, and it has passed into history as the "lost speech." The reports all praised it and editors drew their texts from it; but no one could reproduce the "lost speech." The delegates, however, carried its inspiration with them to the first National Convention of the Republican party about to meet in Philadelphia.

While that Convention was in session, Lincoln was on the circuit, trying cases. One noon as he came to dinner at the tavern where he was staying he found an excited group, discussing the news from the Philadelphia Convention, which they were reading

in a Chicago paper. Fremont had been nominated for President, and in the balloting for Vice-president one hundred and ten votes were recorded for Lincoln. The latter protested with a careless air, that they could not have been thinking of him, and that the votes must have been meant for a Massachusetts Lincoln.

Further reports, however, showed that the Illinois delegates had proudly presented the name of the author of the "lost speech," and while, happily, he was not chosen for the second place on the ticket, they had introduced to the nation the name of Abraham Lincoln.

"A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF"

The Lincoln-Douglas contest for the Senate in 1858. - Douglas's restored popularity. - Leading Republicans discourage any opposition to the "Little Giant's" reëlection. - Lincoln alarmed by the Dred Scott Decision, March 6, 1857. — Deaf to friends who warned him against declaring that the Union could not endure half slave and half free. - His celebrated opening speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858. — He matched himself against Douglas at the climax of the latter's brilliant career. Their personal references to each other. "You cannot fool all the people all the time."

WHEN Douglas went before the people of Illinois in 1858, asking for a third term in the Senate of the United States, Lincoln dared to match himself against the most famous and brilliant campaigner of the time, at the height of his popularity.

By his remarkable skill in juggling the issues of the hour, Douglas seemed to have regained the favor he had lost by his repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Balancing between the North and the South, he had raised in each section the hope that his great weight would be lent to its cause. Now, on the eve of his canvass for reëlection, he boldly arrayed himself against President Buchanan and the national administration of his own party on a

question arising in the bitter struggle between the forces of slavery and antislavery in Kansas, and took his stand with the Republicans in the Senate. His display of courage won for him loud applause throughout the North.

Horace Greeley and other distinguished Republican leaders urged the Republicans of Illinois to join hands with him and return him to the Senate by a unanimous vote. Lincoln was deaf to these appeals. He believed the time had passed for compromise on the question of the spread of slavery. He was in no mood to play politics in what he solemnly felt was a crisis between right and wrong.

In the celebrated case of Dred Scott, the Supreme Court had lately decided that slavery could not be excluded from the territories. That court of last resort now held that the Constitution guaranteed forever "the right to traffic" in slaves, "like an ordinary article of merchandise," in all the territory of the United States.

Lincoln refused to abide by this sweeping doctrine, because he believed that if it were accepted, the next step would be to declare that the free states themselves could not lawfully exclude the traffic from their soil. He foresaw slavery invading his own state of Illinois, and assailing there the system of