argue that they apply only to ‘superior races.’  These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect—­the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy.  They would delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people.  They are the van-guard—­the miners and sappers of returning despotism.  We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.  This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave.  Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.  All honor to Jefferson—­to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Lincoln’s more important political work of the year 1859 was the part he took in the canvass in the State of Ohio, where a governor was to be chosen at the October election, and where the result would decide not merely the present and local strength of the rival candidates, but also to some extent indicate the prospects and probabilities of the Presidential campaign of 1860.  The Ohio Democrats had called Douglas into their canvass, and the Republicans, as soon as they learned the fact, arranged that Lincoln should come and answer him.  There was a fitness in this, not merely because Lincoln’s joint debates with him in Illinois in the previous summer were so successful, but also because Douglas in nearly every speech made since then, both in his Southern tour and elsewhere, alluded to the Illinois campaign, and to Lincoln by name, especially to what he characterized as his political heresies.  By thus everywhere making Lincoln and Lincoln’s utterances a public target, Douglas himself, in effect, prolonged and extended the joint debates over the whole Union.  Another circumstance added to the momentary interest of the general discussion.  Douglas was by nature aggressive.  Determined to hold his Northern followers in the new issues which had grown out of his Freeport doctrine, and the new antagonisms which the recent slave code debate in the Senate revealed, he wrote and published in “Harper’s Magazine” for September, 1859, a political article beginning with the assertion that “Under our complex system of government it is the first duty of American statesmen to mark distinctly the dividing-line between Federal and Local authority.”  Quoting both the paragraph of Lincoln’s Springfield speech declaring that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” and the paragraph from Seward’s Rochester speech, announcing the “irrepressible conflict,” Douglas made a long historical examination