political sagacity far above the comprehension of the ordinary smart politician.  He advised and prevailed upon his Whig supporters to vote for Trumbull, and thus secure a vote in the United States Senate against slavery extension.  He had rightly interpreted both statesmanship and human nature.  His personal sacrifice on this occasion contributed essentially to the coming political regeneration of his State; and the five Anti-Nebraska Democrats, who then wrought his defeat, became his most devoted personal followers and efficient allies in his own later political triumph, which adverse currents, however, were still to delay to a tantalizing degree.  The circumstances of his defeat at that critical stage of his career must have seemed especially irritating, yet he preserved a most remarkable equanimity of temper.  “I regret my defeat moderately,” he wrote to a sympathizing friend, “but I am not nervous about it.”

We may fairly infer that while Mr. Lincoln was not “nervous,” he was nevertheless deeply impressed by the circumstance as an illustration of the grave nature of the pending political controversy.  A letter written by him about half a year later to a friend in Kentucky, is full of such serious reflection as to show that the existing political conditions in the United States had engaged his most profound thought and investigation.

“That spirit,” he wrote, “which desired the peaceful extinction of slavery has itself become extinct with the occasion and the men of the Revolution.  Under the impulse of that occasion, nearly half the States adopted systems of emancipation at once, and it is a significant fact that not a single State has done the like since.  So far as peaceful voluntary emancipation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave in America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of a free mind, is now as fixed and hopeless of change for the better as that of the lost souls of the finally impenitent.  The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.  Our political problem now is, ’Can we as a nation continue together permanently—­forever—­half slave and half free?’ The problem is too mighty for me—­may God, in his mercy, superintend the solution.”

Not quite three years later Mr. Lincoln made the concluding problem of this letter the text of a famous speech.  On the day before his first inauguration as President of the United States, the “Autocrat of all the Russias,” Alexander II, by imperial decree emancipated his serfs; while six weeks after the inauguration the “American masters,” headed by Jefferson Davis, began the greatest war of modern times to perpetuate and spread the institution of slavery.