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le we both had in life. He was then just as good at telling an anecdote as now. He could beat any of the boys wrestling or running a foot-race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper, and the dignity and impartiality with which he presided at a horse-race or a fist-fight, excited the admiration and won the praise of everybody. I sympathized with him because he was struggling with difficulties, and so was I." To which Lincoln replied: "The Judge is woefully at fault about his friend Lincoln being a grocery-keeper. I don't know as it would be a sin if I had been; but he is mistaken. Lincoln never kept a grocery anywhere in the world. It is true that Lincoln did work the latter part of one Winter in a little still house up at the head of a hollow." The serious phases of the debates will now be considered. The opening speech was by Mr. Douglas. That he possessed rare power as a debater, all who heard him can bear witness. Mr. Blaine in his history says: "His mind was fertile in resources. He was master of logic. In that peculiar style of debate which in its intensity resembles a physical combat, he had no equal. He spoke with extraordinary readiness. He used good English, terse, pointed, vigorous. He disregarded the adornments of rhetoric. He never cited historic precedents except from the domain of American politics. Inside that field, his knowledge was comprehensive, minute, critical. He could lead a crowd almost irresistibly to his own conclusions." Douglas was, in very truth, imbued with little of mere sentiment. He gave little time to discussions belonging solely to the realm of the speculative or the abstract. He was in no sense a dreamer. What Coleridge has defined wisdom--"common sense, in an uncommon degree"--was his. In phrase the simplest and most telling, he struck at once at the very core of the controversy. Possibly no man was ever less inclined "to darken counsel with words without knowledge." Positive, and aggressive to the last degree, he never sought "by indirections to find directions out." In statesmanship-- in all that pertained to human affairs--he was intensely practical. With him, in the words of Macaulay, "one acre in Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia." It is a pleasure to recall--after the lapse of half a century--the two men as they shook hands upon the speaker's stand, just before the opening of the debates that were to mark an epoch in American hist
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