votes from one candidate to another in which the prompt and cunning wire-puller had sometimes a magnificent opportunity for his skill.  In this particular contest there were many ballots, and Lincoln at first led.  His supporters were full of eager hope.  Lincoln, looking on, discerned before any of them the setting in of an under-current likely to result in the election of a supporter of Douglas.  He discerned, too, that the surest way to prevent this was for the whole of his friends immediately to go over to the Democrat, Lyman Trumbull, who was a sound opponent of slavery.  He sacrificed his own chance instantly by persuading his supporters to do this.  They were very reluctant, but he overbore them; one, a very old friend, records that he never saw him more earnest and decided.  The same friend records, what is necessary to the appreciation of Lincoln’s conduct, that his personal disappointment and mortification at his failure were great.  Lincoln, it will be remembered, had acted just in this way when he sought election to the House of Representatives; he was to repeat this line of conduct in a manner at least as striking in the following year.  Minute criticism of his action in many matters becomes pointless when we observe that his managing shrewdness was never more signally displayed than it was three times over in the sacrifice of his own personal chances.

For four years, it is to be remembered, the activity and influence of which we are speaking were of little importance beyond the boundaries of Illinois.  It is true that at the Republican Convention in 1856 which chose Fremont as its candidate for the Presidency, Lincoln was exposed for a moment to the risk (for so it was to be regarded) of being nominated for the Vice-Presidency; but even his greatest speech was not noticed outside Illinois, and in the greater part of the Northern States his name was known to comparatively few and to them only as a local notability of the West.  But in the course of 1858 he challenged the attention of the whole country.  There was again a vacancy for a Senator for Illinois.  Douglas was the sole and obvious candidate of the Democrats.  Lincoln came forward as his opponent.  The elections then pending of the State Legislature, which in its turn would elect a Senator, became a contest between Lincoln and Douglas.  In the autumn of that year these rival champions held seven joint debates before mass meetings in the open air at important towns of Illinois, taking turns in the right of opening the debate and replying at its close; in addition each was speaking at meetings of his own at least once a day for three months.  At the end of it all Douglas had won his seat in the Senate, and Lincoln had not yet gained recognition among the Republican leaders as one of themselves.  Nevertheless the contest between Lincoln and Douglas was one of the decisive events in American history, partly from the mere fact that at that particular moment any one opposed Douglas at all; partly from the manner in which, in the hearing of all America, Lincoln formulated the issue between them; partly from the singular stroke by which he deliberately ensured his own defeat and certain further consequences.