to please by verbal enchantment, to inspire loyalty through the impression of mental dimension. It is effective sometimes in promoting a false sense of security by means of skillfully shadowed counsel. Lord Charnwood contrasts the two styles of public discourse very happily in speaking of Lincoln's connection with the debate: 1

One fact about the method of his speaking is easily detected. In debate, at least, he made no use of perorations, and the reader who looks for them will often find that Lincoln just used up the last few minutes in clearing up some unimportant point which he wanted to explain only if there was time for it. We associate our older parliamentary oratory with an art which keeps the hearer pleasedly expectant rather than dangerously attentive, through an argument which if dwelt upon might prove unsubstantial, secure that it all leads in the end to some great cadence of noble sound. But in Lincoln's argumentative speeches the employment of beautiful words is least sparing at the beginning or when he passes to a new subject. It seems as if he deliberately used up his rhetorical effects at the outset to put his audience in the temper in which they would earnestly follow him and to challenge their full attention to reasoning which was to satisfy their calmer judgment. He put himself in a position in which, if I "Abraham Lincoln," pp. 134, 135.

his argument were not sound, nothing could save his speech from failure as a speech. Perhaps no standing epithet of praise hangs with such a weight on a man's reputation as the epithet "honest." . . . It is no mean intellectual and spiritual achievement to be as honest in speech with a crowd as in the dearest intercourse of life.

CHAPTER V

EPILOGUE OF THE DEBATES

The real democratic American idea is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other, but that every one shall have liberty, without hindrance, to be what God made him.— Beecher.

Lincoln was now a permanent figure in national politics. Whether he willed it or not, he could not escape being drafted into the service of his party to further the special motive for which it came into being. He had taken the lead in formulating its doctrine. He had exercised and massed public opinion around that doctrine. Writing to A. G. Henry in November, 1858, he said: "I am glad I made the late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question of the age, which I could have had in no other way; and though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am gone." During the following winter, he prepared a lecture on "Discoveries, Inventions, and Improvements." This he delivered "at several towns in the central part of the State, but it was so

commonplace, and met with such indifferent success, that he soon dropped it altogether." Afterward,

as President, in conversation with Agassiz, Lincoln spoke of having at one time tried his hand "at composing a literary lecture-something which he thought entirely out of his line."2 The composition, Brooks says, "was never finished, and was left among his loose papers at Springfield when he came to Washington."

There is no evidence that Lincoln undertook this lecture as a means of enhancing his income. Henry C. Whitney had read to him a lecture by Bancroft on the "wonderful progress of man," and Lincoln afterward stated to him and to Leonard Swett that he had been "thinking much on the subject and believed he would write a lecture on 'Man and His Progress." Herndon tells us that invitations to deliver the lecture "came in very freely," but Lincoln, probably discouraged by the slight reception accorded him in his few appearances as lecturer already, declined further engagements. Because a

I Herndon and Weik, III:448, 449.

2 Harper's Magazine, XXXI:222-230.

3 Tracy, "Unpublished Letters of Abraham Lincoln," publishes Lincoln's replies to invitations to lecture at Rock Island and Chicago, pp. 104, 141. Dr. William Jayne, in "Personal Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln," p. 11, speaks of Lincoln as having lectured before his literary society at Illinois College, and giving the proceeds to the society.

few Illinois towns in the vicinity of Springfield did not pour out of evenings to listen to Douglas's great opponent in an unfinished dissertation on the progress of man would be no criterion of his competency to compose a lecture or to interest an audience. At Springfield he had addressed a ratification meeting of three, including himself and Herndon, a few days after the birth of the Republican party at Bloomington, Illinois, where he had electrified his audience by the "Lost Speech." The lecture itself is interesting as an initial effort on a learned subject by a man who was deeply interested in the progress of civilization, but who lacked the preparation for composing anything notable or highly instructive on the subject.

Had Lincoln chosen to write a lecture for delivery, or an essay for publication, on some aspect of liberty or democracy, he would doubtless have greatly succeeded. He had the capacity for accurate and searching investigation in such a field, and was gifted with the power of thought to inform facts with striking interest-as his Cooper Institute address the next year abundantly showed.' But even such a lecture, at that time, would have required

1 Arnold, p. 444, says: "There was a lecture of his upon Burns full of favorite quotations and sound criticism." No trace of such a lecture has been found.