ared in closing the debates with Douglas; "that is the issue
that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge
Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between
these two principles--right and wrong--throughout the world. They are
the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of
time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of
humanity, and the other the divine right of kings."

For this representative Anglo-Saxon man, developed under purely American
conditions, maturing slowly, keeping close to facts, dying, like the old
English saint, while he was "still learning," had none of the typical
hardness and selfishness of the Anglo-Saxon. A brooder and idealist, he
was one of those "prophetic souls of the wide world dreaming on things
to come," with sympathies and imagination that reached out beyond the
immediate urgencies of his race and nation to comprehend the universal
task and discipline of the sons of men. In true fraternity and democracy
this Westerner was not only far in advance of his own day, but he is
also far in advance of ours which raises statues to his memory. Yet he
was used to loneliness and to the long view, and even across the welter
of the World War of the twentieth century Lincoln would be tall enough
to see that ship coming into the harbor under full sail.

CHAPTER X. A NEW NATION

The changes that have come over the inner spirit and the outward
expression of American life since Lincoln's day are enough to startle
the curiosity of the dullest observer. Yet they have been accomplished
within the lifetime of a single man of letters. The author of one of the
many campaign biographies of Lincoln in 1860 was William Dean Howells,
then an Ohio journalist of twenty-three. In 1917, at the age of eighty,
Mr. Howells is still adding to his long row of charming and memorable
books. Every phase of American writing since the middle of the last
century has fallen under the keen and kindly scrutiny of this loyal
follower of the art of literature. As producer, editor, critic, and
friend of the foremost writers of his epoch, Mr. Howells has known the
books of our new national era as no one else could have known them. Some
future historian of the period may piece together, from no other sources
than Mr. Howells's writings, an unrivaled picture of our book-making
during more than sixty years. All that the present historian can attemp