Above this counsel of despair, Lincoln's tones rang out like the voice of a prophet. On his side there was no past with its legacy of old wrongs to be defended. He took his stand for a clear principle, for a lofty ideal of human rights, and the eternal years are his. The speeches he delivered in that campaign have taken their place among the masterpieces of political oratory, and retain the power to thrill and inspire a generation unborn when he grappled with the "little giant" on the plains of Illinois.

Yet his practical mind held him closely to practical things. He was not an Abolitionist. Had he tried to address an antislavery meeting in Boston, he would have been hooted off the platform. He never failed to deny Douglas's charge that he believed in "nigger equality."

He frankly said he would not make voters or jurors of the negroes; and he gave it as his opinion that "there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on social and political equality." Nevertheless, he maintained that "in the right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands have earned, the negro is the peer of Judge Douglas or any other man."

He raised no agitation against slavery in the

states where it was established under the authority of the Constitution, although he hoped for its "ultimate peaceable extinction" everywhere. His every reference to his own native South and to the slaveholders was temperate and even charitable.

The southern people, he admitted, were acting as the people of the North would act in the same situation. "If slavery did not exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up. . . . I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself."

His sole concern was to stop the spread of slavery, which he had hated his life long; to keep it out of the territories and out of the free states of the North. In this cause alone he pledged himself to strive, until wherever the Federal government had power "the sun shall shine, the rain shall fall, and the wind shall blow upon no man who goes forth to unrequited toil."

In the closing debate, which took place at Alton, near St. Louis, standing where he could look across the Mississippi and see the shore of the slave state of Missouri, he rested his entire case on the naked question, "Is slavery wrong?"

"That is the real issue," he said with solemn impressiveness. "That is the issue that will con

tinue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles throughout the world."

right and wrong

Lincoln's voice, now at the end of the contest, was as clear as in the beginning, while Douglas's heavier voice was husky and broken. In the course of the campaign there had been only seven debates, but between their joint meetings each had delivered fully a hundred speeches, besides managing all the details of the canvass.

Douglas traveled in great state from point to point in the private car of George B. McClellan, who had lately resigned from the army to become a high official of the Illinois Central Railway. He carried with him a band of musicians, and on a flat car attached to his coach was a cannon to proclaim his coming. Mrs. Douglas often accompanied the Senator, and the influence of her beauty and her gracious manner was regarded with fear by her husband's opponents.

The railway corporation was not friendly to the new party and its disturbing agitation, and Lincoln was obliged to content himself with half a seat in a common car. In such cramped quarters he was more than once compelled to sit up through a wearisome night journey.

Douglas had spent, in his lavish manner, eighty thousand dollars of his private fortune. Lincoln had no fortune on which to draw, and his party had little machinery to be run. As it was, his campaign cost him nearly a thousand dollars, an expense which he could ill afford.

In the election, Lincoln's side received a majority of five thousand on the popular vote, but the arrangement of the districts was such that a few more Democrats than Republicans were chosen to the Legislature, which reëlected Douglas to the Senate.

While Lincoln was walking home in the gloom of the rainy election night after reading the reports of his defeat, he lost his footing in the muddy street; but, recovering his balance, he drew from the little incident a good omen, saying to himself as his thought recurred to the event of the day, "It is a slip and not a fall."

A NATIONAL FIGURE

"The fight must go on."—"I shall fight in the ranks."-Douglas's dearly bought victory. - Lincoln, lacking money for household expenses at end of campaign, returned to work on the circuit. Rising demand upon him to speak in all parts of the country. Answering Douglas in Ohio, September, 1859. -His position on Knownothingism defined. Proposed for the Presidency. "I am not fit to be President." Addressing a great meeting in Cooper Union, New York, February 27, 1860. His triumphs in the East. His New Haven speech held up as an example in English before a class at Yale.

LINCOLN had met his Bunker Hill. He had taken his stand and fought a good fight in a cause that could not fail. "Though I now sink out of view and shall be forgotten," he wrote to a disconsolate supporter, "I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone." Another received this counsel from the defeated candidate, "Let the past as nothing be. . . . The fight must go on," and "I shall fight in the ranks."

Douglas's victory was his own undoing. The Democrats of the South, indignant over the admissions and concessions which he had felt forced