severe flash I was struck blind, and found myself feeling with my fingers for an assurance of my continued physical existence. A little of the bone was left, and I gradually revived.

I say that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent. Oct. 1854.

[From a Speech in 1856.]

Twenty-two years ago, Judge Douglas and I became first acquainted; we were both young men - he a trifle younger than I. Even then we were both ambitious, I perhaps quite as much as he. With me the race of ambition has been a failure a flat failure. With him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation, and it is not unknown in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he has reached, so reached that the oppressed of my species might have shared with me in the elevation. I would rather stand on that eminence than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch's brow.

[From a Speech delivered in 1857. Describing the helpless state of the American slave, he said]:

They have him in his prison-house. They have searched his person and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have

him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.

[From a Speech,* delivered at Springfield, Illinois, June 17, 1858, before the Republican State Convention.]

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased,

Mr. Lincoln read this speech, before its public delivery, to Mr. Herndon. When he had finished the first paragraph, he asked his auditor, "How do you like that? What do you think of it?" "I think," returned Mr. Herndon, "it is true; but is it entirely politic to read or speak it as it is written? " "What makes the difference?" Mr. Lincoln said. "That expression is a truth of all human experience, 'A house divided against itself cannot stand;' and 'he that runs may read.' The proposition is indisputably true, and has been true for more than six thousand years; and I will deliver it as written. I want to use some universally known figure, expressed in simple language as universally

but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, i will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. "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 do 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.

[In the same speech, Mr. Lincoln said that the doctrine of "Squatter Sovereignty," otherwise

known, that may strike home to the minds of men, in order to rouse them to the peril of the times. I would rather be defeated with this expression in the speech, and it held up and discussed before the people, than to be victorious without it."

Mr. Lincoln was not elected senator. In the summer of 1859, at a party of friends, the subject of this speech was discussed. "We all insisted," says Mr. Swett, who was one of the company, "that it was a great mistake," losing him his election. "Well, gentlemen," replied Mr. Lincoln, "you may think that speech was a mistake; but I never have believed it was, and you will see the day when you will consider it was the nicest thing I ever said."-See LAMON'S Life of Lincoln.

called "sacred right of self-government," as expressed in the "Nebraska Bill," by which the right of a slaveholder to hold slaves in any territory or state, was affirmed, amounted to this:]-"That if any one man chose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object."

[From a Speech in reply to Mr. Douglas, July 10, 1858.]

We are now a mighty nation; we are thirty, or about thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years, and we discover that we were then a very small people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly less extent of country, with vastly less of everything we deem desirable among men, we look upon the change as extremely advantageous to us, and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of prosperity. We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men; they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity which we now enjoy has come to us. We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done

in this process of time, of how it was done, and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves; we feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live, for these celebrations.

But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. .. We have besides these descended by blood from our ancestors, men among us, perhaps half our people, who are not descendants at all of these men; they are men who have come from Europe, German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian,- men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through their history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none; they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch, and make themselves feel that they are part of us; but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence, they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," etc., and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of