merciful Maker, who will not turn away from him in any extremity. He notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our heads; and He will not forget the dying man who puts his trust in Him. Say to him that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant; but that if it be his lot to go now he will soon have a joyous meeting with many loved ones gone before, and where the rest of us, through the help of God, hope ere long to join them."

Of all the details of this period of legal practice, however, the most dramatic incident is one of the last, belonging to the summer of 1857 after his new political activity was well under way, and connected with a visit to Cincinnati on the case of McCormick vs. Manny. There he was not only treated with rude contempt by a more prominent lawyer, who looked upon him as a backwoodsman, but the somewhat imaginative account adds that this lawyer even spoke scornfully, within his hearing, of the ridiculous appearance of the apparition from Illinois. At any rate, there seems to be little doubt that Lincoln was wounded. Five years later he made his insulter Secretary of War, and thereby was able to add to this first experience numberless other proofs of magnanimous patience in enduring the brutal absence of decent personal feeling in Edwin M. Stanton. He could say of a certain singer in a light-hearted way, "She is the only

woman that ever appreciated me enough to pay me a compliment," and make other similar jests at his own grotesqueness, but enough is known of his real sensitiveness to suggest what deep strength was required to take all the rough treatment he received from Stanton and so many others with that distant, kind, patient reasonableness that seems more wonderful the more it is thought of. His was the highest dignity. He was unhappy, kind, and alone. Most of his friends speak as if they did not feel they really knew him, and Swett once said, "You cannot tell what Lincoln is going to do, until he does it."

CHAPTER VII

THE DOUGLAS DEBATES

LINCOLN's return to political activity was caused by the same changes that created the Republican party and the Civil War. During his comparative quiescence he had not lost the leadership of the Illinois Whigs, and he took what steps the political situation demanded. In the campaign of 1852 he made a few speeches in favor of Scott, but at that time both parties avoided the real issue, pretending to think the "compromise" of 1850 final - that compromise which gave the South everything, provided for a stricter fugitive slave law, removed the barriers to slavery, repealed the Missouri Compromise by taking the whole subject out of the control of Congress, and yet received the support of Daniel Webster, marked by his great and notorious speech of the 7th of March. Lincoln was interested, especially after the Missouri Compromise was in 1854 openly declared repealed, and even when he was not actively speaking he was thinking. He read all the best speeches of Giddings, Phillips, Sumner, Seward, and Parker, as well as controversial and historical books upon the subject, and he contributed editorial writings

to the Springfield Journal at intervals until 1860. That he was also alive to the game of politics is indicated by Herndon's story of his trick, endorsed by Lincoln, by which a pro-slavery paper was induced to publish an article so extreme as to be damaging to its own cause, after which the anti-slavery people who had got it printed turned in and denounced it. To find his genuine feelings on slavery wholly disconnected from any political considerations it is safest to turn to a letter to his only intimate friend, Speed, August 25, 1855. Speed had written to Lincoln protesting against his opinions, and Lincoln explains at length that, while he would not interfere, against the law, with the property of Speed or any other slaveholder, he thinks the vital difference between them is that his friend looks upon this property as on any other, while he himself sees it as a deep wrong that must be endured but not allowed to spread. "In 1841 you and I had together a tedious low-water trip on a steamboat from Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember as well as I do that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio there were on board ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with irons. That sight was a constant torture to me." On the great issue of the day he remarks, “You say that if Kansas fairly votes herself a free state, as a Christian you will rejoice at it. All decent

slaveholders talk that way, and I don't doubt their candor, but they never vote that way." He indignantly denies any sympathy with the KnowNothing or American party, which consisted of crusaders against Catholics and foreigners, and exclaims that if such ideas should ever get control he would rather emigrate to some country, like Russia, where despotism could be taken pure, with no hypocritical talk about freedom and equality. As late as the Douglas campaign, May 15, 1858, he wrote to E. B. Washburne that the principal danger of defeat came from the American party.

It was fortunate for Lincoln that one of the sharpest blows to the excesses of the slavery party was given by the Democratic leader from his own state. Senator Douglas in 1854 took part in the conflict on the status of slavery in the region which is now Kansas and Nebraska, then seeking admission as territories. He introduced his "Kansas-Nebraska Bill," which, establishing those territories, expressly declared the Missouri Compromise inoperative in them, and an amendment soon declared that compromise inconsistent with the legislation of 1850, which denied any right of intervention by Congress with slavery in territories. This amendment now added the word states to territories in restricting the powers of Congress to interfere. A clause intended to