fit, and he was troubled lest the audience noted its bad habit of flying out of place whenever he raised his arms.

The meeting, probably the most memorable ever held in New York, took place in Cooper Institute. It was an imposing occasion. "No man," one newspaper said, "since the days of Clay and Webster, has spoken to a larger assemblage of the intellect and mental culture of our city." William Cullen Bryant presided. Horace Greeley and men of light and leading were in attendance.

The speech which he delivered was so packed with fact and reason that it was stripped bare of rhetorical flourish. It was a spacious review of the entire constitutional, legislative, and political history of the institution of slavery since the nation was founded. Those who heard it felt their intelligence complimented by the moderation, fairness, and soberness of the learned argument, fit to be addressed to a bench of judges. They were not called on to listen to the special pleading of a trimming politician, to suffer their prejudices to be aroused by an artful stump speaker, or to reward with guffaws his idle jests.

"Let us have faith," was the high keynote he struck, "that right makes might, and, in that faith let us to the end, dare to do our duty as we under

stand it." The four leading papers of the city reported the speech in full, and Greeley said in the Tribune, "No man ever before made such an impression in his first appeal to a New York audience."

New York has been the pitfall of more than one visiting statesman. It was there that Abraham Lincoln proved to himself his power to lead the nation and disproved to himself his original conception that he was "not fit to be President."

From this great triumph, Lincoln went to New England to see his son, Robert, who was at school, and he spoke in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. At New Haven he told his hearers that twenty-five years before he was "a hired laborer, mauling rails, or at work on a flatboat," and that he wished every laborer, black as well as white, to have the same chance to rise that he had enjoyed.

The professor of rhetoric in Yale College observed with admiration the fine structure of his speech. He not only took notes of it and held it up before his class the next day as an example in English composition, but he followed the speaker to a neighboring city, that he might again sit at the feet of this self-taught master of our mother tongue.

THE STANDARD BEARER

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Lincoln's nomination for President a mystery of politics. - All signs pointed to the choice of Seward. Seward men their arrival in Chicago amazed by Lincoln's popularity. — The great scene in the Wigwam at Chicago; Lincoln nominated, May 18, 1860. The third and final ballot: Lincoln of Illinois, 231; Seward of New York, 180; Chase of Ohio, 24; Bates of Missouri, 22; Collamer of Vermont, 5.- How Lincoln received the news. His melancholy presentiment. - The East stunned by the choice of the rail-splitter. - Douglas's tribute to his old-time foe. - Lincoln's silence in the campaign. The "Wide Awakes" and their "rail-fence march." The result of the election, November 6, 1860: Lincoln of Illinois, Republican, 1,866,452; Douglas of Illinois, Northern Democrat, 1,375,157; Breckinridge of Kentucky, Southern Democrat, 847,953; Bell of Tennessee, Constitutional Union, 590,631. Electoral vote: Lincoln, 180; Breckinridge, 72; Bell, 39; Douglas, 12.

As the time drew near for the meeting of the Republican National Convention of 1860, all signs seemed to point to the choice of William H. Seward of New York, and Lincoln's nomination for President remains one of the mysteries of politics.

A large majority of the representative men of the Republican party throughout the country favored Seward. Wealth and influence were enlisted on

his side. He was easily the foremost member of the party. State after state, in the West as well as in the East, declared for him. Indeed, no other candidate had succeeded in winning any open support beyond the borders of his own state. His opponents were regarded merely as "favorite sons."

It has been estimated that nearly if not quite two-thirds of the delegates went to the National Convention with the expectation of voting for Seward and nominating him. At least eight of the twenty-two delegates from Illinois herself favored him, while he left his place in the Senate and went home to be in readiness to receive the committee of notification.

Lincoln had consented to let the Republicans of Illinois present his name, but chiefly with the idea that in this way he might help the party in the state and keep himself in line for Douglas's seat in the Senate. He never was heard to express a definite hope that he would be nominated for President. At one time he was afraid he would not have the support even of his own state. He never looked upon himself as a positive and aggressive candidate.

"I suppose," he wrote to an Ohio man two months before the Convention, "I am not the first choice

of a very great many. Our policy, then, is to give no offense to others- leave them in a mood to come to us if they shall be compelled to give up their first love."

Only a few weeks in advance of the Convention, he was for some time in Chicago, where he was engaged in court. His presence in the city attracted no attention among politicians or in the press. Nothing occurred in the course of his stay that foreshadowed the great acclaim with which, in that very city a month hence, he was to be nominated for the highest honor in the land.

Nevertheless, some of Lincoln's loyal old friends on the circuit, the men whom he had been drawing to him ever since he walked into New Salem with his wardrobe in a bandanna handkerchief, were not inactive. They quietly visited other states and canvassed the public men at Washington, sowing the seed for him as a second choice or as the compromise candidate.

Yet his name was not always included in the list of possibilities in the eastern press, and the East did not seriously consider him in connection with the Presidency until the meeting of the Illinois State Convention, which was held only one week before the assembling of the National Convention.

As Lincoln was going to this former gathering,