rk which is uttered with little
thought may later easily take on a strong color in the light of
subsequent developments.

In presenting the Republican side of the question Lincoln seemed to feel
a duty beyond that of merely outarguing his opponent. He bore the
weighty burden of a responsibility graver than personal success. He
might prevail in the opinions of his fellow citizens; without this
instant triumph he might so present his cause that the jury of posterity
would declare that the truth lay with him; he might even convince both
the present and the coming generations; and though achieving all these
triumphs, he might still fall far short of the peculiar and exacting
requirement of the occasion. For the winning of the senatorship was the
insignificant part of what he had undertaken; his momentous charge was
to maintain a grand moral crusade, to stimulate and to vindicate a great
uprising in the cause of humanity and of justice. His full appreciation
of this is entirely manifest in the tone of his speeches. They have an
earnestness, a gravity, at times even a solemnity, unusual in such
encounters in any era or before any audiences, but unprecedented "on the
stump" before the uproarious gatherings of the West at that day.
Repeatedly he stigmatized slavery as "a moral, a social, a political
evil." Very impressively he denounced the positions of an opponent who
"cared not whether slavery was voted down or voted up," who said that
slavery was not to be differentiated from the many domestic institutions
and daily affairs which civilized societies control by police
regulations. He said that slavery could not be treated as "only equal to
the cranberry laws of Indiana;" that slaves could not be put "upon a par
with onions and potatoes;" that to Douglas he supposed that the
institution really "looked small," but that a great proportion of the
American people regarded slavery as "a vast moral evil." "The real issue
in this controversy--the one pressing upon every mind--is the sentiment
on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery _as
a wrong_, and of another class that does _not_ look upon it as a
wrong.... No man can logically say he does not care whether a wrong is
voted up or voted down. He [Douglas] contends that whatever community
wants slaves has a right to have them. So they have, if it is not a
wrong. But if it is a wrong, he cannot say people have a right to do
wrong. He says that, upon the scor