and probably irregular Western court is obvious, and the story concludes with the quite credible assertion that the defendants themselves were relieved.  Any good jury would, of course, have been steeled against the appeal, which might have been expected, to their compassion for a poor and honest old man.  A kind of innocent and benign cunning has been the most engaging quality in not a few great characters.  It is tempting, though at the risk of undue solemnity, to look for the secret of Lincoln’s cunning in this instance.  We know from copybooks and other sources that these two young men, starting on the down grade with the help of their blackguardly legal adviser, were objects for pity, more so than the man who was about to lose a certain number of dollars.  Lincoln, as few other men would have done, felt a certain actual regret for them then and there; he felt it so naturally that he knew the same sympathy could be aroused, at least in twelve honest men who already wished they could find for the plaintiff.  It has often been remarked that the cause of his later power was a knowledge of the people’s mind which was curiously but vitally bound up with his own rectitude.

Any attempt that we may make to analyse a subtle character and in some respects to trace its growth is certain to miss the exact mark.  But it is in any case plain that Abraham Lincoln left political life in 1849, a praiseworthy self-made man with good sound views but with nothing much to distinguish him above many other such, and at a sudden call returned to political life in 1854 with a touch of something quite uncommon added to those good sound views.

4. The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise.

The South had become captive to politicians, personally reputable and of some executive capacity, who had converted its natural prejudice into a definite doctrine which was paradoxical and almost inconceivably narrow, and who, as is common in such instances of perversion and fanaticism, knew hardly any scruple in the practical enforcement of their doctrine.  In the North, on the other hand, though there were some few politicians who were clever and well-intentioned, public opinion had no very definite character, and public men generally speaking were flabby.  At such a time the sheer adventurer has an excellent field before him and perhaps has his appointed use.

Stephen Douglas, who was four years younger than Lincoln, had come to Illinois from the Eastern States just about the time when Lincoln entered the Legislature.  He had neither money nor friends to start with, but almost immediately secured, by his extraordinary address in pushing himself, a clerkship in the Assembly.  He soon became, like Lincoln, a lawyer and a legislator, but was on the Democratic side.  He rapidly soared into regions beyond the reach of Lincoln, and in 1847 became a Senator for Illinois, where he later became Chairman of the Committee on Territories, and as such