eads plotting against the people. They are the vanguard, the
miners and sappers, of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they
will subjugate us. This is a world of compensation; and he who would be
no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others
deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain
it. All honor to Jefferson to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a
struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness,
forecast, and capacity to introduce into a mere revolutionary document an
abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm
it there that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and
a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and
oppression.

Your obedient servant,

A. LINCOLN.

TO T. CANISIUS.

SPRINGFIELD, May 17, 1859.

DR. THEODORE CANISIUS.

DEAR SIR:--Your note asking, in behalf of yourself and other German
citizens, whether I am for or against the constitutional provision in
regard to naturalized citizens, lately adopted by Massachusetts, and
whether I am for or against a fusion of the Republicans and other
opposition elements for the canvass of 1860, is received.

Massachusetts is a sovereign and independent State; and it is no privilege
of mine to scold her for what she does. Still, if from what she has done
an inference is sought to be drawn as to what I would do, I may
without impropriety speak out. I say, then, that, as I understand the
Massachusetts provision, I am against its adoption in Illinois, or in any
other place where I have a right to oppose it. Understanding the spirit of
our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever
tends to degrade them. I have some little notoriety for commiserating the
oppressed negro; and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor
any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though
born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself.
As to the matter of fusion, I am for it if it can be had on Republican
grounds; and I am not for it on any other terms. A fusion on any other
terms would be as foolish as unprincipled. It would lose the whole North,
while the common enemy would still carry the whole South. The question of
men is a different one. There are good, patriotic men and able statesmen
in the South whom I would cheerfully support, if they wou