e key to the
campaign he proposed. "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I
believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half
free. I do not expect the house to fall--but I do expect it will
cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other."

Then followed the famous charge of conspiracy against the slavery
advocates, the charge that Pierce, Buchanan, Chief Justice Taney, and
Douglas had been making a concerted effort to legalize the institution
of slavery "in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as
South." He marshaled one after another of the measures that the
pro-slavery leaders had secured in the past four years, and clinched
the argument by one of his inimitable illustrations.

"When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we
know have been gotten out of different times and places and by
different workmen,--Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James,[A] for
instance,--and we see these timbers joined together, and see they
exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and
mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the
different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a
piece too many or too few, not omitting even the scaffolding--or, if a
single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted
and prepared yet to bring such a piece in--in such a case we find it
impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and
James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked
upon a common plan or draft, drawn up before the first blow was
struck."

The speech was severely criticised by Lincoln's friends. It was too
radical. It was sectional. He heard the complaints unmoved. "If I had
to draw a pen across my record," he said, one day, "and erase my whole
life from sight, and I had one poor gift of choice left as to what I
should save from the wreck, I should choose that speech and leave it
to the world unerased."

The speech, was, in fact, one of great political adroitness. It forced
Douglas to do exactly what he did not want to do in Illinois; explain
his own record during the past four years; explain the true meaning of
the Kansas-Nebraska bill; discuss the Dred Scott decision; say whether
or not he thought slavery so good a thing that the country could
afford to extend it instead of confining it where it would be in
course of gradual extinction. Douglas wa