cause could not safely be entrusted to the keeping of one who “did not care whether slavery be voted up or down.”  This opinion prevailed in Illinois; but the influences within the Republican party over which it prevailed yielded only a reluctant acquiescence, if they acquiesced at all, after having materially strengthened Douglas’s position.  Such was the situation of things when the campaign of 1858 between Lincoln and Douglas began.

Lincoln opened the campaign on his side at the convention which nominated him as the Republican candidate for the senatorship, with a memorable saying which sounded like a shout from the watchtower of history:  “A house divided against itself cannot stand.  I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.  I do not expect the Union to be dissolved.  I do not expect the house to fall, but I expect it will cease to be divided.  It will become all one thing or all the other.  Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States,—­old as well as new, North as well as South.”  Then he proceeded to point out that the Nebraska doctrine combined with the Dred Scott decision worked in the direction of making the nation “all slave.”  Here was the “irrepressible conflict” spoken of by Seward a short time later, in a speech made famous mainly by that phrase.  If there was any new discovery in it, the right of priority was Lincoln’s.  This utterance proved not only his statesmanlike conception of the issue, but also, in his situation as a candidate, the firmness of his moral courage.  The friends to whom he had read the draught of this speech before he delivered it warned him anxiously that its delivery might be fatal to his success in the election.  This was shrewd advice, in the ordinary sense.  While a slaveholder could threaten disunion with impunity, the mere suggestion that the existence of slavery was incompatible with freedom in the Union would hazard the political chances of any public man in the North.  But Lincoln was inflexible.  “It is true,” said he, “and I will deliver it as written....  I would rather be defeated with these expressions in my speech held up and discussed before the people than be victorious without them.”  The statesman was right in his far-seeing judgment and his conscientious statement of the truth, but the practical politicians were also right in their prediction of the immediate effect.  Douglas instantly seized upon the declaration that a house divided against itself cannot stand as the main objective point of his attack, interpreting it as an incitement to a “relentless sectional war,” and there is no doubt that the persistent reiteration of this charge served to frighten not a few timid souls.