game; if Douglas answers, he can never be President, and the battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this."

Keeping his resolve, he asked Douglas, the next day, if, in his opinion, the people of a territory could lawfully exclude slavery from its limits. In other words, he asked him if there was anything left of his popular sovereignty doctrine now that the Supreme Court had decided in the Dred Scott case that slavery could not be prohibited in the territories.

Douglas answered that there still remained a way to restrict slavery and that a territorial legislature could keep it out of the territory by "unfriendly legislation," regardless of the Supreme Court. This reply made possible his success in Illinois and his reëlection to the Senate; but the South, as Lincoln expected it would, greeted with an outburst of denunciation this "Freeport heresy," so called because of the name of the little town in which the momentous question was put and answered.

The debates fully justified Lincoln's purpose in proposing them. They aroused public opinion as perhaps no other political meetings anywhere ever have aroused it. No one could ignore the one question at issue or remain indifferent to the result. The excitement spread like a prairie fire.

People swarmed to the meetings by the thousands.

They came from forty and fifty miles around, entire families leaving their homes and taking their bedding and their cooking utensils with them. Gay cavalcades of young men and wagons laden with rustic belles escorted the speakers to the meeting places, which were roofed by the open sky and with only the far horizon of the flat lands for their walls.

The debates were justified as well by their dignity. The most restless and enthusiastic crowds were free from ruffianism. The debaters and their audiences were sobered and exalted by the imposing theme of discussion. Little wooden villages were made historic by the immortal words uttered within their limits.

Douglas and Lincoln both sought to avoid personalities, but the latter's better temper gave him the advantage in this respect. Only once did he fall to the level of recrimination, when he was stung to say of his rival, "I don't want to quarrel with him . . . to call him a liar, but when I come square up to him, I don't know what else to call him."

At another time, however, he referred to a certain show of fight which Douglas had made and assured the people there would be no fight between them. "He and I are about the best friends in the world," said Lincoln, "and when we get together he would

no more think of fighting me than of fighting his wife." Douglas sometimes broke out with a fiery retort to the "black Republicans" who interrupted him. "I am clinching Lincoln now, and you are scared to death," he shouted one day when the crowd became noisy.

Each man staked his election wholly on the slavery question. Neither dodged it or digressed to any other subject. The greatest disadvantage which Douglas suffered, as we see him in the light of a later day, is to be charged to the position he took. His face was turned to the past and all its dark prejudices, while Lincoln's was turned to the future and its noble hopes. Douglas had the Union and the Constitution, the Supreme Court and the supremacy of the law, with which to round his swelling periods; but over his head forever hung the evil shadow of human bondage.

"I don't care whether slavery be voted up or voted down," he said, with the eye of his ambition always on the South and the Presidency. "I don't believe the negro is any kin of mine at all," he declared, while he flung his contempt at "black niggers" and demanded, with cynical carelessness, "Who among you expects to live, or have his children live, until slavery shall be established in Illinois or abolished in South Carolina ?"