or whether Lincoln made this remark. It so happily expresses his faith in the final wisdom of the common people, however, that the words are likely ever to stand to the credit of his name.

As Douglas journeyed down the state, his triumph continued, and he seemed to be having his own imperious way with the cheering people. At Springfield, Lincoln replied to him, and, referring to some sharp personal flings, he protested that he intended to conduct the canvass strictly as a gentleman, "in substance at least, if not in the outside polish. The latter I shall never be, but that which constitutes the inside of a gentleman, I hope I understand."

He confessed he had been a "flat failure" in the race of ambition on which he and Douglas had started in that very town twenty years before, and he added, "I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached. So reached that the oppressed of my species might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch's brow."

THE GREAT DEBATE

1858. — National atThe opening debate

Douglas challenged by Lincoln, July 24, tention attracted to their joint meetings. at Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858. - A picturesque audience. - The prairies lit up by the camp-fires of the great crowd. Sharp contrasts between the two antagonists. Their appearance and their methods. — Friends beg Lincoln not to ask his "Freeport questions," August 27, 1858.-"The battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this." Douglas's tour made in great state in McClellan's car while Lincoln rode in a crowded coach. The position of each speaker on the slavery question. Douglas's costly campaign. His slender victory at the polls. "A slip and not a fall."

LINCOLN now determined to challenge Douglas to meet him in joint debate. It was midsummer, and he realized he had not stemmed the tide of popular interest which was bearing his antagonist

on to success.

With the prestige of his name and with his art as a stump speaker, Douglas was filling the eye and the ear of the state, skilfully juggling with all sorts of questions. Lincoln, on the other hand, was making poor headway, unaided, as he was, by the glamour of victory and confined by his own serious purpose to the single issue of the restriction of slavery. It

was under these circumstances that he resolved to confront his wily opponent face to face on the platform, in an effort to hold him to a logical discussion of the real question of the campaign and focus upon it the attention of the people.

Douglas did not shrink from a close encounter, and an agreement was readily made for seven debates. Lincoln's friends were fearful. Not a few of them thought he was placing his head in the lion's mouth.

The great battle opened in August. The eye of the nation was attracted by the duel. Press correspondents hastened to the scene from as far away as New York, and car-loads of people from Chicago poured into the dusty little village which had been chosen for the first debate. Country folk came the night before in wagons, on horseback, and afoot, and their camp-fires lit up the prairie as if an army were in bivouac.

The meeting was held in the open air in the presence of a vast throng, before which the two champions stood in sharp contrast. Douglas was hardly five feet four inches tall, but his broad shoulders and stalwart neck were surmounted by a head massive and majestic. His voice could deepen to a roar, while, well-groomed and prosperous-looking, he strode the stage as one at home and at ease.

Lincoln's clothes, on the contrary, hung on his frame of six feet four as if it were a rack. Little twinkling gray eyes lit up, when aroused, the shadows of sorrow in his furrowed face, above which a shock of coarse dark hair tumbled in utter lawlessness. A high tenor voice, nervously running almost into a piping falsetto, added to the disappointment of the first impression which his presence gave. To complete an unpromising picture, his stooping figure with the hands clasped at the back was stiff with awkwardness as he began to speak.

The very homeliness of the man, however, his modest bearing, and his air of mingled sadness and sincerity excited sympathy and drew to him the hearts of the plain people. When he had warmed to his task, and his big right hand had fallen to his side, ready to point out with a long, bony finger the truth he felt, and when his head swung backward or forward in an expressive emphasis, the listeners found their thought as well as their feeling enlisted. He seemed to have no stage manners, no studied art. His gestures were as simple as his words, yet when he was deeply stirred, waves of emotion swept over him, his thin voice softened into music, and his giant figure was glorified by a heroic spirit.

At the end of this first encounter between the two

men, most of the politicians on both sides felt that Douglas had outclassed his opponent. Lincoln's partisans in the crowd, however, did not share that feeling. Those near the stand rushed upon it, and, in their enthusiasm, lifted him to their shoulders and bore him away to his tavern.

"Don't, boys," he pleaded in vain; "let me down; come now, don't." He was in too serious a mood to like any of the usual claptrap of campaigning. He had little patience with “fizzlegigs and fireworks,” as he described the spectacular aspects of the contest.

After the meeting, modestly reassuring a friend, he wrote, "Douglas and I for the first time this canvass crossed swords here yesterday. The fire flew some and I am glad to say I am yet alive."

He determined to draw a heavier fire at the next chance. The night before the second debate he showed some followers the notes of several questions which he intended to ask Douglas. The friends, taking alarm, begged him not to put one of the questions, but he stood firm against their entreaties as they gathered about him at midnight in his sleeping

room.

"If you put it," one of them finally warned him, "you can never be Senator."

"Gentlemen," he answered, as he drew his lips together between the words, "I am killing larger