ed a fallacious
argument or made an unfair score--he was entirely human. But this is
the testimony of an Illinois political wire-puller to Lincoln: "He was
one of the shrewdest politicians in the State. Nobody had more
experience in that way. Nobody knew better what was passing in the
minds of the people. Nobody knew better how to turn things to
advantage politically." And then he goes on--and this is really the
sum of what is to be said of his oratory: "He could not cheat people
out of their votes any more than he could out of their money."

3. _Lincoln against Douglas_.

It has now to be told how the contest with Douglas which concluded
Lincoln's labours in Illinois affected the broad stream of political
events in America as a whole. Lincoln, as we know, was still only a
local personage; Illinois is a State bigger than Ireland, but it is
only a little part and was still a rather raw and provincial part of
the United States; but Douglas had for years been a national personage,
for a time the greatest man among the Democrats, and now, for a reason
which did him honour, he was in disgrace with many of his party and on
the point of becoming the hero of all moderate Republicans.

We need not follow in much detail the events of the great political
world. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise threw it into a ferment,
which the continuing disorders in Kansas were in themselves sufficient
to keep up. New great names were being made in debate in the Senate;
Seward, the most powerful opponent of the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise, kept his place as the foremost man in the Republican party
not by consistency in the stand that he made, but by his mastery of New
York political machinery; Sumner of Massachusetts, the friend of John
Bright, kept up a continual protest for freedom in turgid, scholarly
harangues, which caught the spirit of Cicero's Philippics most
successfully in their personal offensiveness. Powerful voices in
literature and the Press were heard upon the same side--the _New York
Tribune_, edited by Horace Greeley, acquired, as far as a paper in so
large a country can, a national importance. Broadly it may be said
that the stirring intellect of America old and young was with the
Republicans--it is a pleasant trifle to note that Longfellow gave up a
visit to Europe to vote for Fremont as President, and we know the views
of Motley and of Lowell and of Darwin's fellow labourer Asa Gray. But
fashion and