law gives to slavery in the body politic.  I object to it because it assumes that there can be moral right in the enslaving of one man by another.  I object to it as a dangerous dalliance for a free people—­a sad evidence that, feeling prosperity, we forget right; that liberty, as a principle, we have ceased to revere....  Little by little, but steadily as man’s march to the grave, we have been giving up the old for the new faith.  Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now, from that beginning, we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a ’sacred right of self-government.’  These principles cannot stand together.  They are as opposite as God and Mammon.”

If one compares the serious tone of this speech with the hard cider and coon-skin buncombe of the Harrison campaign of 1840, and its lofty philosophical thought with the humorous declamation of the Taylor campaign of 1848, the speaker’s advance in mental development at once becomes apparent.  In this single effort Mr. Lincoln had risen from the class of the politician to the rank of the statesman.  There is a well-founded tradition that Douglas, disconcerted and troubled by Lincoln’s unexpected manifestation of power in the Springfield and Peoria debates, sought a friendly interview with his opponent, and obtained from him an agreement that neither one of them would make any further speeches before the election.

The local interest in the campaign was greatly heightened by the fact that the term of Douglas’s Democratic colleague in the United States Senate was about to expire, and that the State legislature to be elected would have the choosing of his successor.  It is not probable that Lincoln built much hope upon this coming political chance, as the Democratic party had been throughout the whole history of the State in decided political control.  It turned out, nevertheless, that in the election held on November 7, an opposition majority of members of the legislature was chosen, and Lincoln became, to outward appearances, the most available opposition candidate.  But party disintegration had been only partial.  Lincoln and his party friends still called themselves Whigs, though they could muster only a minority of the total membership of the legislature.  The so-called Anti-Nebraska Democrats, opposing Douglas and his followers, were still too full of traditional party prejudice to help elect a pronounced Whig to the United States Senate, though as strongly “Anti-Nebraska” as themselves.  Five of them brought forward, and stubbornly voted for, Lyman Trumbull, an Anti-Nebraska Democrat of ability, who had been chosen representative in Congress from the eighth Illinois District in the recent election.  On the ninth ballot it became evident to Lincoln that there was danger of a new Democratic candidate, neutral on the Nebraska question, being chosen.  In this contingency, he manifested a personal generosity and