stood.  Within a few weeks, however, this unlooked-for good fortune befell.  In October, 1859, he was invited to speak in the following winter in New York.  That the anti-slavery men of that city wished to test him by personal observation signified that his reputation was national, and that the highest aspirations were, therefore, not altogether presumptuous.  He accepted gladly, and immediately began to prepare an address which probably cost him more labor than any other speech which he ever made.  He found time, however, in December to make a journey through Kansas, where he delivered several speeches, which have not been preserved but are described as “repetitions of those previously made in Illinois.”  Lamon tells us that the journey was an “ovation,” and that “wherever Lincoln went, he was met by vast assemblages of people.”  The population of this agricultural State was hardly in a condition to furnish “vast assemblages” at numerous points, but doubtless the visitor received gratifying assurance that upon this battle-ground of slavery and anti-slavery the winning party warmly appreciated his advocacy of their cause.

On Saturday, February 25, 1860, Lincoln arrived in New York.  On Monday his hosts “found him dressed in a sleek and shining suit of new black, covered with very apparent creases and wrinkles, acquired by being packed too closely and too long in his little valise.  He felt uneasy in his new clothes and a strange place.”  Certainly nothing in his previous experience had prepared him to meet with entire indifference an audience of metropolitan critics; indeed, had the surroundings been more familiar, he had enough at stake to tax his equanimity when William Cullen Bryant introduced him simply as “an eminent citizen of the West, hitherto known to you only by reputation.”  Probably the first impression made upon those auditors by the ungainly Westerner in his outlandish garb were not the same which they carried home with them a little later.  The speech was so condensed that a sketch of it is not possible.  Fortunately it had the excellent quality of steadily expanding in interest and improving to the end.

Of the Dred Scott case he cleverly said that the courts had decided it “in a sort of way;” but, after all, the decision was “mainly based upon a mistaken statement of fact,—­the statement in the opinion that ’the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.’”

In closing, he begged the Republicans, in behalf of peace and harmony, to “do nothing through passion and ill-temper;” but he immediately went on to show the antagonism between Republican opinion and Democratic opinion with a distinctness which left no hope of harmony, and very little hope of peace.  To satisfy the Southerners, he said, we must “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.  And this must be done thoroughly,—­done in acts as well as in words....