Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/469

 1858] Douglas and Lincoln. 437 finished Douglas; and no one could hear his speech and think him common. He had taken his own way of learning to the bar. The passion for letters had been strong upon him since a boy, and his self- training had with unerring instinct followed a fine plan of mastery. By reasoning upon the principles of the law, as they came to him out of a few text-books, by poring upon books of mathematics, by reading up and down through such books of history or adventure as fell in his way in search of the experience of other men, by constant intimacy of talk and play of argument with men of every kind to whom he had access, he had made himself a master of brief and careful statement, of persuasion, and of oral debate : thoughtful, observant, steering in what he said by an unfluctuating compass of logical precision, and above all lucid, full of homely wit and anecdote such as was fit to illuminate practical subjects, and uttering phrases which found the heart of what he talked of, sometimes phrases which struck his opponent like a blow, but fair, unmalicious, intellectual, not passionate. His definition of the matter to be settled between the parties was characteristic of him. " A house divided against itself,*" he said, " can- not stand. I believe this government cannot endure half slave and half free. I do not expect the house to fall, but I expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other." Douglas found him a very uncomfortable antagonist, who drove him to awkward admissions. Before their debate was over Douglas was no longer within reach of the Presidency ; and Abraham Lincoln had won the ear of the whole country. The southern men could not vote for Douglas as the nominee and spokesman of their party. He had been forced under Lincoln's fire to admit that Congress could not empower a territorial legislature, its own creature, to do what, if the Dred Scott decision spoke true law, it was itself unable to do; that southern settlers, therefore, could no more legalise slavery within a Territory than northern settlers could exclude it : that " popular sovereignty " was no solution, after all. The Republicans did not obtain a majority in the Illinois legislature; Douglas went back to the Senate; but he went back weakened and with loss of authority. The elections of the autumn, taking the country as a whole, gave the Republicans success enough to show how near at hand a crisis was. They increased their numbers materially in both House and Senate, carried Buchanan's own State of Pennsylvania by a handsome majority, and made it very evident that opinion was swinging their way. In the House of Representatives, indeed, they were put in a position of virtual control: for no coherent party had a working majority there. The "Douglas Democrats," who had refused to vote for the admission of Kansas with a pro-slavery constitu- tion, were now hardly an integral part of the Democratic party ; there was still a group of twenty-two Know-Nothings ; and the Republicans held the balance of power. CH. XIII.