e all
speaking. That Lincoln should not only have so far outstripped men of
his own party, but should have out-argued Douglas, was the cause of
comment everywhere. "No man of this generation," said the "Evening
Post" editorially, at the close of the debate, "has grown more rapidly
before the country than Lincoln in this canvass." As a matter of fact,
Lincoln had attracted the attention of all the thinking men of the
country. "The first thing that really awakened my interest in him,"
says Henry Ward Beecher, "was his speech parallel with Douglas in
Illinois, and indeed it was that manifestation of ability that secured
his nomination to the Presidency."

But able as were Lincoln's arguments, deep as was the impression he
had made, he was not elected to the senatorship. Douglas won fairly
enough; though it is well to note that if the Republicans did not
elect a senator they gained a substantial number of votes over those
polled in 1856.

Lincoln accepted the result with a serenity inexplicable to his
supporters. To him the contest was but one battle in a "durable"
struggle. Little matter who won now, if in the end the right
triumphed. From the first he had looked at the final result--not at
the senatorship. "I do not claim, gentlemen, to be unselfish," he said
at Chicago in July. "I do not pretend that I would not like to go to
the United States Senate; I make no such hypocritical pretense; but I
do say to you that in this mighty issue, it is nothing to you, nothing
to the mass of the people of the nation, whether or not Judge Douglas
or myself shall ever be heard of after this night; it may be a trifle
to either of us, but in connection with this mighty question, upon
which hang the destinies of the nation perhaps, it is absolutely
nothing."

The intense heat and fury of the debates, the defeat in November, did
not alter a jot this high view. "I am glad I made the late race," he
wrote Dr. A. H. Henry. "It gave me a hearing on the great and durable
question of the age which I would have had in no other way; and though
I now sink out of view and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made
some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I
am gone."

At that date perhaps no one appreciated the value of what Lincoln had
done as well as he did himself. He was absolutely sure he was right
and that in the end people would see it. Though he might not rise, he
knew his cause would.

"Douglas had the ingen