ay? This obvious point was
not lost upon the acute intelligence of one man, a citizen of Douglas's
own State and one of the "moderates" who had joined the Republican Party
on the Nebraska issue.

Abraham Lincoln was by birth a Southerner and a native of Kentucky, a
fact which he never forgot and of which he was exceedingly proud. After
the wandering boyhood of a pioneer and a period of manual labour as a
"rail-splitter" he had settled in Illinois, where he had picked up his
own education and become a successful lawyer. He had sat in the House of
Representatives as a Whig from 1846 to 1848, the period of the Mexican
War, during which he had acted with the main body of his party, neither
defending the whole of the policy which led to the war nor opposing it
to the extent of refusing supplies for its prosecution. He had voted,
as he said, for the Wilmot Proviso "as good as fifty times," and had
made a moderate proposition in relation to Slavery in the district of
Columbia, for which Garrison's _Liberator_ had pilloried him as "the
Slave-Hound of Illinois." He had not offered himself for re-election in
1848. Though an opponent of Slavery on principle, he had accepted the
Compromise of 1850, including its Fugitive Slave Clauses, as a
satisfactory all-round settlement, and was, by his own account, losing
interest in politics when the action of Douglas and its consequences
called into activity a genius which few, if any, had suspected.

A man like Lincoln cannot be adequately described in the short space
available in such a book as this. His externals are well appreciated,
his tall figure, his powerful ugliness, his awkward strength, his racy
humour, his fits of temperamental melancholy; well appreciated also his
firmness, wisdom and patriotism. But if we wish to grasp the peculiar
quality which makes him almost unique among great men of action, we
shall perhaps find the key in the fact that his favourite private
recreation was working out for himself the propositions of Euclid. He
had a mind not only peculiarly just but singularly logical, one might
really say singularly mathematical. His reasoning is always so good as
to make his speeches in contrast to the finest rhetorical oratory a
constant delight to those who have something of the same type of mind.
In this he had a certain affinity with Jefferson. But while in
Jefferson's case the tendency has been to class him, in spite of his
great practical achievements, as a mere