much he earned, he seems to have ended every year hardly richer than he began it, and yet, as the years passed, fees came to him freely.  One of L 1,000 is recorded—­a very large professional fee at that time, even in any part of America, the paradise of lawyers.  I lay great stress on Lincoln’s career as a lawyer—­much more than his biographers do because in America a state of things exists wholly different from that which prevails in Great Britain.  The profession of the law always has been and is to this day the principal avenue to public life; and I am sure that his training and experience in the courts had much to do with the development of those forces of intellect and character which he soon displayed on a broader arena.

It was in political controversy, of course, that he acquired his wide reputation, and made his deep and lasting impression upon the people of what had now become the powerful State of Illinois, and upon the people of the Great West, to whom the political power and control of the United States were already surely and swiftly passing from the older Eastern States.  It was this reputation and this impression, and the familiar knowledge of his character which had come to them from his local leadership, that happily inspired the people of the West to present him as their candidate, and to press him upon the Republican convention of 1860 as the fit and necessary leader in the struggle for life which was before the nation.

That struggle, as you all know, arose out of the terrible question of slavery—­and I must trust to your general knowledge of the history of that question to make intelligible the attitude and leadership of Lincoln as the champion of the hosts of freedom in the final contest.  Negro slavery had been firmly established in the Southern States from an early period of their history.  In 1619, the year before the Mayflower landed our Pilgrim Fathers upon Plymouth Rock, a Dutch ship had discharged a cargo of African slaves at Jamestown in Virginia:  All through the colonial period their importation had continued.  A few had found their way into the Northern States, but none of them in sufficient numbers to constitute danger or to afford a basis for political power.  At the time of the adoption of the Federal Constitution, there is no doubt that the principal members of the convention not only condemned slavery as a moral, social, and political evil, but believed that by the suppression of the slave trade it was in the course of gradual extinction in the South, as it certainly was in the North.  Washington, in his will, provided for the emancipation of his own slaves, and said to Jefferson that it “was among his first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in his country might be abolished.”  Jefferson said, referring to the institution:  “I tremble for my country when I think that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever,”—­and Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Patrick Henry were all utterly opposed