two years afterward, he practised a self-control and a courtesy which held him aloof from all personal wrangling. He fought measures and not men, and relied upon the arguments of the mind rather than those of the fists.

The Washingtonian temperance movement which swept over the land reawakened Lincoln's early interest in the subject. The moral and humane aspects of the crusade stirred him and inspired him to deliver a powerful address, in which he foretold the time "when there shall be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth."

If there was a moral principle beneath any question presented to him, his nature was certain to respond to it. This was shown again when Knownothingism raised its head, and, by secret methods, attempted to place foreign-born residents under the ban and to discriminate against men on account of their religious belief. As the movement gained in strength, timid politicians were thrown into a panic. Lincoln, on the other hand, struck at the thing boldly, and at the very outset of the agitation he offered a resolution in convention declaring that the right of conscience "belongs no less to the Catholic than to the Protestant." No form of intolerance or proscription had a place in the make-up of the man.

MARRIAGE AND POLITICS

Lincoln's lack of the social graces. His strange courtship of Mary Todd. - Their sharp differences in temperament and breeding. His long wrestle with doubt. - A period of almost suicidal despair. - Miss Todd innocently involved him in an absurd duel with General Shields, September, 1842, which became the means of reuniting them. Their abrupt marriage, November 4, 1842. The ambitious bride's faith in her husband's future. Lincoln elected to Congress in 1846.

THE graces of a lady's man were denied Lincoln. "Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links which make up the chain of a woman's happiness at least it was so in my case. This is the verdict, and doubtless a fair verdict, of one who rejected him as a suitor. She rightfully complained that when they were riding and came to a stream, he never thought of seeing that her horse got safely over the ford, but galloped on, trusting her to look out for herself.

He never had any parlor small talk. He retained through life an indifference to social formalities. He seemed not to defy them, but never to understand them. In Springfield he could not wholly avoid

the society of the place, because of the rank which he took at the bar and in politics. From the first his associations were with persons who pretended to some breeding in the young and ambitious capital, where, as he wrote, there was "a good deal of flourishing about in carriages." When he felt called upon to attend a ball, he danced little, and was rather given to annoying the women by diverting their partners to a corner of the room, where he generally held forth to a masculine group.

In the same year he went to Springfield, Mary Todd came from Kentucky to visit her eldest sister, who had married into a notable family of Illinois. After a stay of a few months, she returned to her native state, but came again two years later to make her sister's home her own, in preference to her father's house, over which a step-mother presided. She was a spirited, impulsive, outspoken, pretty little woman of twenty-one, used to refined society and as well educated as a woman could be in those days.

Her sister's spacious dwelling was the social center of the town, and Miss Todd never was without attentions and admirers. In an open competition among them, Lincoln, poor and awkward, would have been easily distanced, for in her train were graceful courtiers like Stephen A. Douglas. Notwithstanding her pride of family, for she was de

scended from governors and generals, her interest was enlisted in the character of the former woodchopper, and the bright promise of future distinction which he wore excited her ambition.

Her family did not look kindly upon her preference for him, and the halting and doubting suitor himself would have discouraged a less resolute woman. She and Lincoln were not only opposites in breeding but in temperament as well, and the course of their love never ran smoothly. Whether in his conflicting emotions and morbid presentiments of unhappiness he failed her on the appointed wedding day, history is not certain. There is no question, however, that he brought his relations with her to an abrupt end, and plunged into a period of desperate melancholy.

Friends watched him and cared for him with anxious solicitude. He wrote to his partner, then in Congress, that he was the most miserable man living, and that if his misery were distributed among the human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth. He could not tell if he would ever recover; "I awfully forebode I shall not." In his groping for help, he wrote a noted Cincinnati doctor, describing his condition, his early love for Ann Rutledge and his more recent experience, and asking him to prescribe.

After months of this unhappy mood a good friend, who was going to Kentucky to see his betrothed, took Lincoln with him. There the heart-sick patient gained some relief amid new scenes and faces, and most of all in striving to cure his friend, who was strangely stricken with the same tormenting doubts in his own love affair. When he had seen this case end in a happy marriage and he had returned to Illinois, he wrote to the bridegroom with glowing satisfaction: "I always was superstitious. I believe God made me one of the instruments of bringing you and Fanny together, which union I have no doubt He had foreordained. Whatever He designs, He will do for me yet."

Ever present in his mind was the sad plight in which he had placed Miss Todd. It was a wound in his honor. He reproached himself for even wishing to be happy when he thought of her whom he had made unhappy. "That," he wrote, "still kills my soul." When he heard, after a year, that she had taken a short journey and had said she enjoyed it, he exclaimed, “God be praised for that."

Finally, this strange love story of Lincoln and Mary Todd was threatened with the blood stain of a tragedy, which, fortunately, turned out to be a roaring farce. For political purposes he wrote a letter to the Springfield paper, pretending to come