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CHAPTER XIII.

SELECTIONS FROM SPEECHES AND LETTERS.

BORN, 1809; DIED, 1865, AGED 56.-CAPTAIN IN THE BLACK HAWK WAR.- ELECTED TO THE ILLINOIS STATE LEGISLATURE, 1834.- AGAIN, 1836.- ADMITTED TO THE BAR, 1837.- ELECTED TO CONGRESS, 1846.- MEMBER OF THE COMMITTEE ON POST-OFFICES AND POST-ROADS AND WAR-DEPARTMENT EXPENSES.-MADE HIS FIRST SPEECH IN CONGRESS, JAN. 12, 1848, IN OPPOSITION TO THE MEXICAN WAR.-SPEECH IN COOPER'S INSTITUTE, NEW YORK CITY, 1860.-PRESIDENT, 1860-1865.

["HE is the author of a multitude of good sayings, so disguised as pleasantries that it is certain they had no reputation at first but as jests; and only later by the very acceptance and adoption they find in the mouths of millions, turn out to be the wisdom of the hour. I am sure if this man had ruled in a period of less facility of printing, he would have become mythological in a very few years, like Æsop or Pilpay, or one of the Seven Wise Masters, by his fables and proverbs.

"But the weight and penetration of many passages in his letters, messages, and speeches, hidden now by the very closeness of their application to the moment, are destined hereafter to a wide fame. What pregnant definitions! what unerring com

mon-sense! what foresight! and, on great occasions, what lofty, and, more than national, what humane tone.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson.

How his quaint wit made home-truth

seem more true. · London Punch.]

[From a Lecture before the Springfield Lyceum, on the Perpetuation of our Free Institutions, January, 1837.]

.. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

[Letter to Mr. Herndon.]*

WASHINGTON, February 1, 1848.

That vote affirms that the [Mexican] war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President; and I will stake my life, that, if you had been in my place, you would have voted just as I did. Would you have voted what you felt and knew to be a lie? I know you would not. Would you have gone out of the House, skulked the vote? I expect not. If you had skulked one vote, you would have to

* Mr. Lincoln voted for Mr. Ashmun's amendment.

skulk many more before the end of the session. Richardson's resolutions, introduced before I made any move, or gave any vote upon the subject, make the direct question of the justice of the war; so that no man can be silent if he would. You are compelled to speak; and your only alternative is to tell the truth or tell a lie.

[To the Same.]

WASHINGTON, July 10, 1848.

The way for a young man to rise is to improve himself every way he can, never suspecting that anybody wishes to hinder him. Allow me to assure you that suspicion and jealousy never did help any man in any situation. There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will succeed, too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel, to brood over the attempted injury. Cast about, and see if this feeling has not injured every person you have ever known to fall into it.

[From a Speech in Congress, July 27, 1848.]

The other day one of the gentlemen from Georgia, an eloquent man, and a man of learning, so far as I could judge, not being learned myself, came down upon us astonishingly. He spoke in what the Baltimore American calls the "scathing and withering style." At the end of his second

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

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