would not be actually unlawful in a Territory, but would never actually exist in it if the Territorial Legislature chose to abstain, as it could, from passing any of the laws which would in practice be necessary to protect slave property.  By advocating this view Douglas would fully reassure those of his former supporters in Illinois who puzzled themselves on the Dred Scott case, but he would infuriate the South.  Lincoln determined to force Douglas into this position by the questions which he challenged him to answer.  When he told his friends of his ambition, they all told him he would lose his election.  “Gentlemen,” said Lincoln, “I am killing larger game; if Douglas answers, he can never be President, and the battle of 1860 is worth a hundred of this.”  The South was already angry with Douglas for his action over the Kansas Constitution, but he would have been an invincible candidate for the South to support in 1860, and it must have told in his favour that his offence then had been one of plain honesty.  But in this fresh offence the Southern leaders had some cause to accuse him of double dealing, and they swore he should not be President.

A majority of the new Illinois Legislature returned Douglas to the Senate.  Lincoln, however, had an actual majority of the votes of the whole State.  Probably also he had gained a hold on Illinois for the future out of all proportion to the actual number of votes then given against the popular Douglas, and above all he had gathered to him a band of supporters who had unbounded belief in him.  But his fall for the moment was little noticed or regretted outside Illinois, or at any rate in the great Eastern States, to which Illinois was, so to speak, the provinces and he a provincial attorney.  His first words in the campaign had made a stir, but the rest of his speeches in these long debates could not be much noticed at a distance.  Douglas had won, and the presumption was that he had proved himself the better man.  Lincoln had performed what, apart from results, was a work of intellectual merit beyond the compass of any American statesman since Hamilton; moreover, as can now be seen, there had been great results; for, first, the young Republican party had not capitulated and collapsed, and, then, the great Democratic party, established in power, in indifference, and in complicity with wrong, was split clean in two.  But these were not results that could be read yet awhile in election figures.  Meanwhile the exhausted Lincoln reconciled himself for the moment to failure.  As a private man he was thoroughly content that he could soon work off his debt for his election expenses, could earn about 500 pounds a year, and be secure in the possession of the little house and the 2,000 pounds capital which was “as much as any man ought to have.”  As a public man he was sadly proud that he had at least “said some words which may bear fruit after I am forgotten.”  Persistent melancholy and incurable elasticity can go together, and they make a very strong combination.  The tone of resignation had not passed away from his comparatively intimate letters when he was writing little notes to one political acquaintance and another inciting them to look forward to the fun of the next fight.