I remember being once much amused at seeing two partially intoxicated men engaged in a fight with their great-coats on, which fight, after a long and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat and into that of the other.  If the two leading parties of this day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have performed the same feat as the two drunken men.

But soberly, it is now no child’s play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation.  One would state with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but nevertheless he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms.  The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society.  And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success.  One dashingly calls them “glittering generalities.”  Another bluntly calls them “self-evident lies.”  And others insidiously argue that they apply to “superior races.”  These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect—­the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy.  They would delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people.  They are the vanguard, the miners and sappers, of returning despotism.  We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.  This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave.  Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.  All honor to Jefferson to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a mere revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

Your obedient servant,

A. Lincoln.

TO T. CANISIUS.

Springfield, May 17, 1859.

Dr. Theodore CANISIUS.

Dear sir:—­Your note asking, in behalf of yourself and other German citizens, whether I am for or against the constitutional provision in regard to naturalized citizens, lately adopted by Massachusetts, and whether I am for or against a fusion of the Republicans and other opposition elements for the canvass of 1860, is received.