He could not keep his seat; he rose and walked rapidly up and down the platform, behind Lincoln, holding his watch in his hand, and obviously impatient for the call of ’time.’ A spectator says:  ’He was greatly agitated, his long grizzled hair waving in the wind, like the shaggy locks of an enraged lion.’  It was while Douglas was thus exhibiting to the crowd his eager desire to stop Lincoln, that the latter, holding the audience entranced by his eloquence, was striking his heaviest blows.  The instant the secondhand of his watch reached the point at which Lincoln’s time was up, Douglas, holding up the watch, called out:  ‘Sit down, Lincoln, sit down!  Your time is up!’ Turning to Douglas, Lincoln said calmly:  ’I will.  I will quit.  I believe my time is up.’  ‘Yes,’ said a voice from the platform, ’Douglas has had enough; it is time you let up on him.’”

The institution of slavery was, of course, the topic around which circled all the arguments in these joint discussions.  It was the great topic of the hour—­the important point of division between the Republican and Democratic parties.  Lincoln’s exposition of the subject was profound and masterly.  At the meeting in Quincy the issue was defined and the argument driven home with unsparing logic and directness.  In closing the debate, he said: 

I wish to return to Judge Douglas my profound thanks for his public annunciation here to-day, to be put on record, that his system of policy in regard to the institution of slavery contemplates that it shall last forever.  We are getting a little nearer the true issue of this controversy, and I am profoundly grateful for this one sentence.  Judge Douglas asks you, ’Why cannot the institution of slavery, or, rather, why cannot the nation, part slave and part free, continue as our fathers made it forever?’ In the first place, I insist that our fathers did not make this nation half slave and half free, or part slave and part free.  I insist that they found the institution of slavery existing here.  They did not make it so, but they left it so, because they knew of no way to get rid of it at that time.  When Judge Douglas undertakes to say that, as a matter of choice, the fathers of the Government made this nation part slave and part free, he assumes what is historically a falsehood.  More than that; when the fathers of the Government cut off the source of slavery by the abolition of the slave-trade, and adopted a system of restricting it from the new Territories where it had not existed, I maintain that they placed it where they understood, and all sensible men understood, it was in the course of ultimate extinction; and when Judge Douglas asks me why it cannot continue as our fathers made it, I ask him why he and his friends could not let it remain as our friends made it?  It is precisely all I ask of him in relation to the institution of slavery, that it shall be placed upon the basis that our fathers