e Young Men's Republican Union of New York, to exemplify its wisdom,
truthfulness, and learning. No one who has not actually attempted to
verify its details can understand the patient research and historical
labor which it embodies. The history of our earlier politics is
scattered through numerous journals, statutes, pamphlets, and letters;
and these are defective in completeness and accuracy of statement, and
in indices and tables of contents. Neither can any one who has not
travelled over this precise ground appreciate the accuracy of every
trivial detail, or the self-denying impartiality with which Mr. Lincoln
has turned from the testimony of "the Fathers," on the general question
of slavery, to present the single question which he discusses. From the
first line to the last--from his premises to his conclusion, he travels
with swift, unerring directness which no logician ever excelled--an
argument complete and full, without the affectation of learning, and
without the stiffness which usually accompanies dates and details. A
single, easy, simple sentence of plain Anglo-Saxon words contains a
chapter of history that, in some instances, has taken days of labor to
verify and which must have cost the author months of investigation to
acquire. And, though the public should justly estimate the labor
bestowed on the facts which are stated, they cannot estimate the greater
labor involved on those which are omitted--how many pages have been
read--how many works examined--what numerous statutes, resolutions,
speeches, letters, and biographies have been looked through. Commencing
with this address as a political pamphlet, the reader will leave it as
an historical work--brief, complete, profound, impartial,
truthful--which will survive the time and the occasion that called it
forth, and be esteemed hereafter, no less for its intrinsic worth than
its unpretending modesty.

NEW YORK, September, 1860.

ADDRESS

MR. PRESIDENT AND FELLOW-CITIZENS OF NEW YORK:--The facts with which
I shall deal this evening are mainly old and familiar; nor is there
anything new in the general use I shall make of them. If there shall
be any novelty, it will be in the mode of presenting the facts, and
the inferences and observations following that presentation.

In his speech last autumn, at Columbus, Ohio, as reported in the New
York _Times_, Senator Douglas said:

"_Our fathers, when they framed the Government