in a minority in the State, he was forced to the front because his friends thought he was the only man with whom they could win.  In a canvass his friends had to do all the management.  He knew nothing of how to reach the people except by addressing their reason.  If the situation had been reversed—­Lincoln representing the majority and Douglas the minority—­I think it most likely Lincoln would never have had the place.  He had no heart for a fight with friends.”

The Hon. James G. Blaine has given a masterly description and analysis of the comparative powers of the two illustrious debaters.  Douglas, says Mr. Blaine, “was everywhere known as a debater of singular skill.  His mind was fertile in resources.  He was a master of logic.  No man perceived more quickly than he the strength or the weakness of an argument, and no one excelled him in the use of sophistry and fallacy.  Where he could not elucidate a point to his own advantage, he would fatally becloud it for his opponent.  In that peculiar style of debate which in intensity resembles a physical combat, he had no equal.  He spoke with extraordinary readiness.  There was no halting in his phrase.  He used good English, terse, vigorous, pointed.  He disregarded the adornments of rhetoric—­rarely used a simile.  He was utterly destitute of humor, and had slight appreciation of wit.  He never cited historical precedents except from the domain of American politics.  Inside that field his knowledge was comprehensive, minute, critical; beyond it his learning was limited.  He was not a reader.  His recreations were not in literature.  In the whole range of his voluminous speaking, it would be difficult to find either a line of poetry or a classical allusion.  But he was by nature an orator, and by long practice a debater.  He could lead a crowd almost irresistibly to his own conclusions.  He could, if he wished, incite a mob to desperate deeds.  He was, in short, an able, audacious, almost unconquerable opponent in public discussion.  It would have been impossible to find any man of the same type able to meet him before the people of Illinois.  Whoever attempted it would probably have been destroyed in the first encounter.  But the man who was chosen to meet him, who challenged him to the combat, was radically different in every phase of character.  Scarcely could two men be more unlike in mental and moral constitution than Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas.  Lincoln was calm and philosophic.  He loved the truth for the truth’s sake.  He would not argue from a false premise, or be deceived himself or deceive others by a false conclusion.  He had pondered deeply on the issues which aroused him to action.  He had given anxious thought to the problems of free government, and to the destiny of the Republic.  He had marked out a path of duty for himself, and he walked it fearlessly.  His mental processes were slower but more profound than those of Douglas.  He did not seek to say merely the thing which was best