e found them friendly but immovable. Editor
Horace Greeley said to him: "The Republican standard is too high; we
want something practical." This, we may be pretty sure, stiffened
Lincoln's back, as a man with a cause that he cared for, and, for that
matter, as a really shrewd manager in a party which he thought stood
for something. It reveals the flabbiness which the Northerners were in
danger of making a governing tradition of policy. The wrongfulness of
any extension of slavery might be loudly asserted in 1854, but in 1858,
when it no longer looked as if so great an extension of it was really
imminent, there was no harm in shifting towards some less provocative
principle on which more people at the moment might agree. Confronted
with Northern politicians who would reason in this fashion stood a
united South whose leaders were by now accustomed to make the Union
Government go which way they chose and had no sort of disposition to
compromise their principle in the least. "What," as Lincoln put it in
an address given, not long after his contest with Douglas, at the
Cooper Institute in New York, "what do you think will content the
South?" "Nothing," he answered, "but an acknowledgment that slavery is
right." "Holding as they do that slavery is morally right and socially
elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of
it, as a legal right and a social blessing. Nor can we justifiably
withhold this on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong."
That being so, there was no use, he said, in "groping about for some
middle ground between right and wrong," or in "a policy of 'don't care'
on a question about which all true men do care." And there is ample
evidence that he understood rightly the policy of the South. It is
very doubtful whether any large extension of cultivation by slave
labour was economically possible in Kansas or in regions yet further
North, but we have seen to what lengths the Southern leaders would go
in the attempt to secure even a limited recognition of slavery as
lawful in a new State. They were not succeeding in the business of the
Kansas Constitution. But they had a very good prospect of a far more
important success. The celebrated dicta of Chief Justice Taney and
other judges in the Dred Scott case had not amounted to an actual
decision, nor if they had would a single decision have been
irreversible. Whether the principle of them should become fixed in
Amer