said: "only patriots and traitors." They were
the best words he could have spoken. They were the last he ever spoke to
his countrymen, for at once he was stricken down with a swift and mortal
illness and hurried to his end. A little while before the end, his wife
bent over him for a message to his sons. He roused himself, and said:
"Tell them to obey the laws and support the Constitution of the United
States." He died on June 11, 1861, in the forty-ninth year of his age.

It was a hard time to die. War was at hand, and his strong nature
stirred at the call. Plunged in his youth into affairs, and wonted all
his life to action, he had played a man's part in great events, and
greater were impending. He had taken many blows of men and circumstance,
and stormy times might bring redress. He was a leader, and for want of
him a great party must go leaderless and stumbling to a long series of
defeats. He was a true American, and his country was in danger. He was
ambitious, and his career was not rightly finished. He was the second
man in the Republic, and he might yet be the first.

But first he never could have been while Lincoln lived, nor ever could
have got a hold like Lincoln's on his kind. His place is secure among
the venturesome, strong, self-reliant men who in various ages and
countries have for a time hastened, or stayed, or diverted from its
natural channel the great stream of affairs. The sin of his ambition is
forgiven him for the good end he made. But for all his splendid energy
and his brilliant parts, for all the charm of his bold assault on
fortune and his dauntless bearing in adversity, we cannot turn from him
to his rival but with changed and softened eyes. For Lincoln, indeed, is
one of the few men eminent in politics whom we admit into the hidden
places of our thought; and there, released from that coarse clay which
prisoned him, we companion him forever with the gentle and heroic of
older lands. Douglas abides without.

The Riverside Press

_Electrotyped and printed by H.O. Houghton & Co._

_Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A._

End of Project Gutenberg's Stephen Arnold Douglas, by William Garrott Brown

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