argumentative speeches the employment of beautiful words is least sparing at the beginning or when he passes to a new subject.  It seems as if he deliberately used up his rhetorical effects at the outset to put his audience in the temper in which they would earnestly follow him and to challenge their full attention to reasoning which was to satisfy their calmer judgment.  He put himself in a position in which if his argument were not sound nothing could save his speech from failure as a speech.  Perhaps no standing epithet of praise hangs with such a weight on a man’s reputation as the epithet “honest.”  When the man is proved not to be a fraud, it suggests a very mediocre virtue.  But the method by which Lincoln actually confirmed his early won and dangerous reputation of honesty was a positive and potent performance of rare distinction.  It is no mean intellectual and spiritual achievement to be as honest in speech with a crowd as in the dearest intercourse of life.  It is not, of course, pretended that he never used a fallacious argument or made an unfair score—­he was entirely human.  But this is the testimony of an Illinois political wire-puller to Lincoln:  “He was one of the shrewdest politicians in the State.  Nobody had more experience in that way.  Nobody knew better what was passing in the minds of the people.  Nobody knew better how to turn things to advantage politically.”  And then he goes on—­and this is really the sum of what is to be said of his oratory:  “He could not cheat people out of their votes any more than he could out of their money.”

3. Lincoln against Douglas.

It has now to be told how the contest with Douglas which concluded Lincoln’s labours in Illinois affected the broad stream of political events in America as a whole.  Lincoln, as we know, was still only a local personage; Illinois is a State bigger than Ireland, but it is only a little part and was still a rather raw and provincial part of the United States; but Douglas had for years been a national personage, for a time the greatest man among the Democrats, and now, for a reason which did him honour, he was in disgrace with many of his party and on the point of becoming the hero of all moderate Republicans.

We need not follow in much detail the events of the great political world.  The repeal of the Missouri Compromise threw it into a ferment, which the continuing disorders in Kansas were in themselves sufficient to keep up.  New great names were being made in debate in the Senate; Seward, the most powerful opponent of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, kept his place as the foremost man in the Republican party not by consistency in the stand that he made, but by his mastery of New York political machinery; Sumner of Massachusetts, the friend of John Bright, kept up a continual protest for freedom in turgid, scholarly harangues, which caught the spirit of Cicero’s Philippics most successfully in their personal offensiveness.