s that other more universal "right," the paramount "charter of
liberty," by which, in his view, all other rights were conditioned. He
would impose on all mankind, as their basic moral obligation, the duty
to sacrifice all personal likes, personal ambitions, when these in their
permanent tendencies ran contrary to the tendency which he rated as
paramount. Such had always been, and was always to continue, his own
attitude toward slavery. No one ever loathed it more. But he never
permitted it to take the first place in his thoughts. If it could
be eradicated without in the process creating dangers for popular
government he would rejoice. But all the schemes of the Abolitionists,
hitherto, he had condemned as dangerous devices because they would
strain too severely the fabric of the popular state, would violate
agreements which alone made it possible. Therefore, being always
relentless toward himself, he required of himself the renunciation of
this personal hope whenever, in whatever way, it threatened to make less
effective the great democratic state which appeared to him the central
fact of the world.

The enlargement of his reasoning led him inevitably to an unsparing
condemnation of the Virginian theory. One of his rare flashes of
irritation was an exclamation that Virginia loyalty always had an
"if."(6) At this point, to make him entirely plain, there is needed
another basic assumption which he has never quite formulated. However,
it is so obviously latent in his thinking that the main lines are to be
made out clearly enough. Building ever on that paramount obligation
of all mankind to consider first the welfare of God's plain people, he
assumed that whenever by any course of action any congregation of men
were thrown together and led to form any political unit, they were never
thereafter free to disregard in their attitude toward that unit its
value in supporting and advancing the general cause of the welfare of
the plain people. A sweeping, and in some contingencies, a terrible
doctrine! Certainly, as to individuals, classes, communities even, a
doctrine that might easily become destructive. But it formed the basis
of all Lincoln's thought about the "majority" in America. Upon it
would have rested his reply, had he ever made a reply, to the Virginia
contention that while his theory might apply to each individual State,
it could not apply to the group of States. He would have treated such
a reply, whether fairly or un