slave and half free.  “What in God’s name,” said some friend after the meeting, “could induce you to promulgate such an opinion?” “Upon my soul,” he said, “I think it is true,” and he could not be argued out of this opinion.  Finally the friend protested that, true or not, no good could come of spreading this opinion abroad, and after grave reflection Lincoln promised not to utter it again for the present.  Now, in 1858, having prepared his speech he read it to Herndon.  Herndon questioned whether the passage on the divided house was politic.  Lincoln said:  “I would rather be defeated with this expression in my speech, and uphold and discuss it before the people, than be victorious without it.”  Once more, just before he delivered it, he read it over to a dozen or so of his closest supporters, for it was his way to discuss his intentions fully with friends, sometimes accepting their advice most submissively and sometimes disregarding it wholly.  One said it was “ahead of its time,” another that it was a “damned fool utterance.”  All more or less strongly condemned it, except this time Herndon, who, according to his recollection, said, “It will make you President.”  He listened to all and then addressed them, we are told, substantially as follows:  “Friends, this thing has been retarded long enough.  The time has come when these sentiments should be uttered; and if it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the truth—­let me die in the advocacy of what is just and right.”  Rather a memorable pronouncement of a candidate to his committee; and the man who records it is insistent upon every little illustration he can find both of Lincoln’s cunning and of his ambition.

Lincoln did go down in this particular contest.  Many friends wrote and reproved him after this “damned fool utterance,” but his defeat was not, after all, attributed to that.  All the same he did himself assure his defeat, and he did it with extraordinary skill, for the purpose of ensuring that the next President should be a Republican President, though it is impossible he should at that time have counted upon being himself that Republican.  Each candidate had undertaken to answer set questions which his opponent might propound to him.  And great public attention was paid to the answers to these interrogatories.  The Dred Scott judgments created a great difficulty for Douglas; he was bound to treat them as right; but if they were right and Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in a Territory, neither could a Territorial Legislature with authority delegated by Congress have that power; and, if this were made clear, it would seem there was an end of that free choice of the people in the Territories of which Douglas had been the great advocate.  Douglas would use all his evasive skill in keeping away from this difficult point.  If, however, he could be forced to face it Lincoln knew what he would say.  He would say that slavery