but that a great proportion of the American people regarded slavery as “a vast moral evil.”  “The real issue in this controversy—­the one pressing upon every mind—­is the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong....  No man can logically say he does not care whether a wrong is voted up or voted down.  He [Douglas] contends that whatever community wants slaves has a right to have them.  So they have, if it is not a wrong.  But if it is a wrong, he cannot say people have a right to do wrong.  He says that, upon the score of equality, slaves should be allowed to go into a new Territory, like other property.  This is strictly logical if there is no difference between it and other property....  But if you insist that one is wrong and the other right, there is no use to institute a comparison between right and wrong....  That is the real issue.  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.  It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself.  It is the same spirit that says:  ’You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’” “I ask you if it is not a false philosophy?  Is it not a false statesmanship that undertakes to build up a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about the very thing that everybody does care the most about?”

We cannot leave these speeches without a word concerning their literary quality.  In them we might have looked for vigor that would be a little uncouth, wit that would be often coarse, a logic generally sound but always clumsy,—­in a word, tolerably good substance and very poor form.  We are surprised, then, to find many and high excellences in art.  As it is with Bacon’s essays, so it is with these speeches:  the more attentively they are read the more striking appears the closeness of their texture both in logic and in language.  Clear thought is accurately expressed.  Each sentence has its special errand, and each word its individual importance.  There is never either too much or too little.  The work is done with clean precision and no waste.  Nowhere does one pause to seek a meaning or to recover a connection; and an effort to make out a syllabus shows that the most condensed statement has already been used.  There are scintillations of wit and humor, but they are not very numerous.  When Lincoln was urged to adopt a more popular style, he replied:  “The occasion is too serious; the issues are too grave.  I do not seek applause, or to amuse the people, but to convince them.”  This spirit was upon him from the beginning to the end.