struggling for place.
Principles are eternal, and because Lincoln loved principles, Lincoln
belongs to the ages. Douglas wanted office, and because the longest
office is six years, when the six years were over, the people put
another man in his niche; Douglas practically disappeared.

The interest of the people in the seven great joint debates arranged
for this senatorial campaign was beyond all description. Douglas
travelled in a special train and car, with a flat car carrying a cannon
that boomed the announcement of his arrival. He had the wealth and
prestige of the Illinois Central Railroad to support him. Lincoln
trusted to some friend to drive him across country, or had to be
contented with a seat in a caboose of a freight train, waiting on a
switch at a siding, while Douglas's special went whizzing by. The people
of each county made the day of the debate a great holiday. From daylight
until noon all the converging roads were crowded with wagons, carts and
buggies, loaded with people, while other thousands hurried on foot along
the dusty road to the meeting place. From the first Douglas knew his
peril, in that the eyes of the nation were fixed upon his platform, and
that if Lincoln won the debate he won everything. He paid Lincoln the
compliment of saying, "He is the strong man of his party, full of wit,
facts, dates, and the best stump-speaker, with his droll ways and his
dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd, and if I beat
him my victory will be hardly won."

Very different was the praise that Lincoln gave Douglas, as he
contrasted the dazzling fame of the great senator with his own unknown
name. "With me," said Lincoln, "the race of ambition has been a failure,
a flat failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. I affect
no contempt for the high eminence he has reached; ... I would rather
stand on that eminence than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a
monarch's brow." Douglas's speeches do not read well, and there are no
nuggets, proverbs, bright sayings or brilliant epigrams which one can
quote. The substance of his speeches was one and the same, for he
traversed the same ground in each of the seven debates, urging ever that
the new Republican party was simply disguised abolitionism, that Lincoln
wanted to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law, establish the equality of the
blacks, that this was a threat of war against the South, and therefore
revolutionary and sectional. Over again