of equality was general and in some sort of abstract sense slavery was admitted to be wrong.  Now it was boldly claimed by the South that “slavery in the abstract was right.”  All the most powerful influences in the country, “Mammon” (for “the slave property is worth a billion dollars"), “fashion, philosophy,” and even “the theology of the day,” were enlisted in favour of this opinion.  And it met with no resistance.  “You yourself may detest slavery; but your neighbour has five or six slaves, and he is an excellent neighbour, or your son has married his daughter, and they beg you to help save their property, and you vote against your interests and principle to oblige a neighbour, hoping your vote will be on the losing side.”  And again “the party lash and the fear of ridicule will overawe justice and liberty; for it is a singular fact, but none the less a fact and well known by the most common experience, that men will do things under the terror of the party lash that they would not on any account or for any consideration do otherwise; while men, who will march up to the mouth of a loaded cannon without shrinking, will run from the terrible name of ‘Abolitionist,’ even when pronounced by a worthless creature whom they with good reason despise.”  And so people in the North, who could hardly stomach the doctrine that slavery was good, yet lapsed into the feeling that it was a thing indifferent, a thing for which they might rightly shuffle off their responsibility on to the immigrants into Kansas.  This feeling that it was indifferent Lincoln pursued and chastised with special scorn.  But the principle of freedom that they were surrendering was the principle of freedom for themselves as well as for the negro.  The sense of the negro’s rights had been allowed to go back till the prospect of emancipation for him looked immeasurably worse than it had a generation before.  They must recognise that when, by their connivance, they had barred and bolted the door upon the negro, the spirit of tyranny which they had evoked would then “turn and rend them.”  The “central idea” which had now established itself in the intellect of the Southern was one which favoured the enslavement of man by man “apart from colour.”  A definite choice had to be made between the principle of the fathers, which asserted certain rights for all men, and that other principle against which the fathers had rebelled and of which the “divine right of kings” furnished Lincoln with his example.  In what particular manner the white people would be made to feel the principle of tyranny when they had definitely “denied freedom to others” and ceased to “deserve it for themselves” Lincoln did not attempt to say, and perhaps only dimly imagined.  But he was as convinced as any prophet that America stood at the parting of the ways and must choose now the right principle or the wrong with all its consequences.