e things?" I asked Abigail. "From Richard,
from books, from publications, everywhere. I am watching this thrilling
thing called life and I can laugh when I see you taking Douglas and
Lincoln so seriously; for really they amount to very little. Douglas has
given some of his land to found a university. What will they teach in
it? Anything of Douglas'? What? No, young minds will read philosophy
there and study mathematics and chemistry by which engines, bridges,
telegraphs, will be constructed. Here is a funny thing. You remember the
Atlantic cable was laid last summer. Poor old Buchanan, the mighty
President of a mighty Republic, is so ignorant that he doubts the verity
of the message which Queen Victoria sent to him. Douglas and Lincoln!
What are their speculations as to whether this ridiculous old document
called the Constitution goes into a territory or not? Give me old Bishop
Berkeley with his inquiries concerning the virtues of tar water. It
takes imagination of some moment to sense, as he did, that tar contains
the purified spirits of the trees, of vegetation which can heal and help
man. These were dreams worth while. Now a German chemist named Kekule,
comes along and develops a theory called the valence of atoms. And who
can tell what will come of that? For that matter, Sir Walter Raleigh did
more for the world than Douglas. He found petroleum in the Trinidad
pitch lake way back in the sixteenth century. And now a well has just
been drilled, not for salt as you saw it in Kentucky as a boy, but for
the oil for which they then had no use except to make ointment for
people who stumble on the pier trying to catch a boat."

I said to Abigail: "I have never pretended that Douglas was a scientist
or an artist or that he had a philosophical mind, but now that you bring
these things to my attention I want to ask you why he is not a
first-class disciple of Darwin, since he has advocated the processes of
nature in the solution of the slavery question."

"Nature! Well, are climate and soil any more nature than thought? Can't
we use our will and our thought to assist climate and soil, about
anything? But after all I get tired of this emphasis of the one slavery,
just as you do. Why not include some other slaveries for condemnation?
There is Emerson for example. He didn't start out with this John Brown
idea. He began with a plea for emancipation intellectually from England;
and for emancipation from the slavery of orthodoxy."