through all the vicissitudes of a most eventful life. At first he seemed destined to drift about without aim or purpose, much as his father had done; hiring himself out to clear land, to split rails, to work in the fields, in short, to do anything that could be expected from a robust young man of scant education. Among other things he hired himself as a man of all work on a flat boat loaded with merchandise for New Orleans, then the largest city in the United States, for the compensation of eight dollars a month. Then he turned up as captain of volunteers in the Black Hawk War, where he first met Jefferson Davis, Zachary Taylor and Robert Anderson; the latter one day to command Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor; none of them foreseeing the great things that were to happen in their time, and in which they were to play leading parts.

Of all the great men that have ever lived Mr. Lincoln was undoubtedly one of the most intensely human and one of the most original. The thread of his life is one that can never be taken up by any one hereafter, and probably no one will ever undertake to imitate a character so much out of the common run. The only way to imitate him would be to be original; and that would be not to imitate him at all.

In order to understand the career and the mission of Mr. Lincoln, it is absolutely necessary to understand the political principles on which his action was founded; for he was undoubtedly a man of principles, and not a man of expedients. You may read all his writings and speeches through without finding a trace of the spurious and insincere appeals to passion and prejudice that give color to the effusions of the cheap demagogue of modern times.

Mr. Lincoln in his speeches frequently referred to the Declaration of Independence, with expressions of admiration for the principles embodied in that instrument.

In the long disputes concerning slavery, one class of the disputants referred to the Constitution of the United States, which expressly recognized slavery, while the other always referred to the Declaration of Independence, which declared that all men are born free. Thus the disputants had a double standard, and the two standards did not agree, though generally admitted to be of equal value.

At the time of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Pendleton, and all the leaders of public opinion in Virginia were opposed to slavery, and believed that it must come to an end at no distant day. Mr. Clay was later of the same opinion. In writing the Declaration, Jefferson felt that, standing, as it were, on a mountain top, he was addressing not only the world at large, but also all future generations to the very end of time. He found here a priceless opportunity to proclaim a complete code of human liberty in a few words, suited to all ages and to every clime, the equality of all men before the law, and the inalienable right of the people to change their forms of government. Regarding slavery as only a temporary evil, he simply ignored it. At that time slavery still existed in twelve out of thirteen of the colonies. The question as to emancipation had not as yet assumed a sectional aspect. Morally the institution was looked on favorably by the great majority of the people. Many thought that the slaves were better off in a state of servitude than they were among the cannibal tribes in Africa, where every man was the slave of some chief, and the victim of many cruel superstitions. Besides, the condition of the working classes at that time in the Old World was but little better than African slavery; and in many cases it was even worse, since famine and starvation were added to the wretchedness of the lower classes.

As to the Declaration of Independence at the time of the Lincoln and Douglas debates, many and diverse opinions had been expressed. Very commonly it was said that the general principles announced in the Declaration were mere abstractions; this by persons who did not consider that the abstract and the concrete walk through this world hand in hand.

During the decline of the Roman Empire, a church council was held in Rome to ascertain and to declare authoritatively the nature of Christ. So intently did its members engage in the discussion that they did not hear the barbarians thundering at the gates of the city. It was finally agreed that the personality of Christ consisted of two natures, one divine and the other human.

Secularly speaking this was the merest abstraction that could be imagined; and yet it changed the whole current of history for more than a thousand years. The decree may have established the divinity of the church; but it said nothing about the divinity of kings; nevertheless it was seized on to support the assertion that kings are divinely appointed by miraculous selection; that they are divinely directed in every act; that they can do no wrong; that however seemingly wrong a king's actions may be, the only duty of his subjects consists in passive and implicit obedience, under penalty of temporal and eternal punishment; that if royal rule is tyrannical, it is only because God means for some wise and benevolent purpose to chastise his wicked and rebellious sinners by means of his vice-regent on earth.

Such was the doctrine that was almost universally taught and believed throughout continental Europe, and in England until the revolt in the reign of Charles I., and which largely survived that stormy period.

We may judge of the profound hold that the doctrine of the divine right of kings and the duty of passive obedience acquired over the minds of men by two singu

lar incidents. As late as the eighteenth century the Scotch, though puritans of the most advanced type, whose resentment against the Roman Catholic Church was so inveterate and intense that the term AntiChrist was the mildest name they had for the Pope; yet when the Roman Catholic Pretenders invaded Scotland in 1745, they enlisted under their banner because they did not dare to refuse the call of the Lord's anointed.

When this dark cloud of king worship settled over Europe, all real progress was at an end, and a general and stupefying stagnation ensued that lasted for centuries, during which nothing was invented and no book of any value was written. The king, taught from the cradle that he could do no wrong, had small inducement to do right. Looking on common men as inferior beings, he saw them slaughtered in battle without pity or compunction, and usually made his life a succession of acts of tyranny and crime; hence wars were almost incessant, public morals were corrupted, and the world sank deeper and deeper into ignorance and gloom. Royal villainy, so to speak, had become canonized; the vice-gerent of God on earth set the worst example possible to the rest of mankind.

It was against these inveterate and desperate evils that the Declaration of Independence was directed. In the eyes of Mr. Lincoln, that fulmination was neither an abstraction nor "a string of glittering generalities," as had been frequently asserted. It was a new evangel, intended not only for the emancipation of America from the tyranny of George III., but for the emancipation of the human race from every form of tyranny; and it was in that sense that it was understood by Mr. Lincoln when he paraphrased and condensed it by speaking of a government of the people, by the people and for the people, just as the French had paraphrased it three

quarters of a century earlier in their watchword, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." In every instance the meaning was the same.

Considering the situation of the world in 1776, the words in the Declaration of Independence were of the weightiest that ever fell from uninspired lips. They summed up in a few words the principles announced in the Magna Charta, and in the various English petitions and bills of rights, with much more besides. We can see this much more clearly than Mr. Lincoln could in his day. The charters under which the colonies were organized accustomed the American colonists to government defined in written instruments, thus leading to written constitutions based on the will of the people, guarantying the rights of the people. In the rest of the world, save in England, there were no written constitutional guaranties.

We can now judge of the awakening influence of the words of Jefferson when we note that every nation in Europe now has a written constitution, including such backward nations as Russia and Turkey, and that Japan and Persia have joined in the general advance, while China and Siam are momentarily expected to fall into line, so that we can now foresee the complete decline and fall of organic tyranny the world over.

Jefferson and Clay did not agree entirely on the construction of the Constitution; but on the slavery question they were in perfect accord. They both believed that slavery was a curse to the south, in so much as it kept out immigration, discouraged manufacturers, hindered education and discouraged progress. At present these views, reinforced by a long and formidable array of statistics, will hardly be denied by any intelligent person.

However high the ideals of the people of the south may have been, with their system of labor those ideals could never be realized. Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Clay