Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/45

 Abraham Lincoln.

��35

��control of the Democrat io party, and no person, unless lie was willing; to do their bidding, could hope tor advancement within that piity. That was the situation wlien, on the 'I'MK ot Januaiy. 1854, Stephen A. Di)u<^las, as a bid tor tlie next president al noniination of his i)aity, iiitiodnced Itito the senate tUn famous Kansas-Ntbraska bill, repealing the Miss"uri Compromise. Nolioily in Illinois had asked Mr. Dcuifjlas to take that step. It was the order of the slave power, and the pas- sage of the bill wis a declaration of war on the part of the South. Very soon b ith parties began to throw (int skirmishers into Kansas, and the result of the preliminary struggle was witi the North.

It I ad bffome evident to the minds of such men as William H. SeWiird a d Abraham Line In that the "irrepressible conflict between oppi sing and endurini forces" had begun. It was in the open- ing sentence of his great ^peech of the 17th of June, 1858, that Mr. Lincoln s;ud,— "A house divided against itself cannot stand I believe that this government cannot eu'ite permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the ITnion to be dissolved. I do not expect the iiouse will tall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will be- come all one thing or all the oth»'r. Either the opponeiits of si very will arrest the 1 urth r spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief th.it it is in course of ultimate extinc- tion, or its advoc;itPS will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, Noith as well as South."

The course of Mr. Douglas having made him the most conspicuous of the nemocratic leaders in the North, his ambition was no longer limited to the Senate or any place within the gift of the peo- ple ot Illinois. He now aspired to the presidpncy of the United States. For twenty years Mr. Lin- coln bad been his rival and competit< r, antagoniz- ing him step by step. He had nu t him repeatedly in oebat •, and had answered his arguments on the tariff and internal improvements, and, more recent- ly, upon the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and "popular sovereignty," until he had come to be recognized as the champion of the free >tate men. Od all sides it was expected of him that he should again take the stump in opposition to Mr. Doug- las ana the aggressions of the sbive power. The famous deb ite of 1858 between them made Mr. Lincoln well known to the whc.le country, and wit'iout doubt the si iial abili'y which he then displayed, the moderation and fairness of his views, coupled with his inflexible tirmness for the right, made him the candidate of the Republican party in 18§0.

In his speeches he did not deal in second-hand ideas His practical tr lining prevented his being bookish or fond of abstractions From his own wide experience with men and nature he drew illustrations familiar to himsf If aTid to his audi- ences. He was not inclined to the use of invective, and was slow to applj hard names to his oppo- nents He prefered 'o appeal to their intelligence and sense of iiistice, an to convince them through their reason. He never undertook to per- suade men by personal abuse. In his public dis- cussions he seems to have neen always charitable towar s those who dirt'ered with him, apparently believing they might be honestly wrong, and seek- ing to win them to his way of thinking. He never claimed for himself or hi- party all the wis- dom ami viitue of the country, nor denied a fair share to his oppon. nts ; and" yet U'der his wise counsel, and in a large mea ure by his efforts, the anti-s'avery Whigs, the free-soil' Democr. ndered irapotsible forever hereatt-r, with the Pacific Riilwav built, and a generous homestead given to every settler, all uiuier the ad- ministration of the first president elected by that

��party, the country has gone on in a course of pros- perity never equalled before, and has grown so in j)opiilalion, and so multinliri'l all those comforts ami necessa'ies of life which go to make up the collective we 1th of a peo)ile. that it has become the most populous, the wealthies', and, I may add, the most powerful natioi: in Christendom. It leads the van of civilization.

Rut it is natural for us to be not quite satisfied. It is hard to let well enough alone. Toe best is not quite good enough; and it is as well so, otherwise if we were too easily coutent we sboul i make no progress. In this age of boycotts, lockouts, and strike", su cessful and otherwise, we hear a great deal about socialism, communism, niliilistu, anar- chy, the land ques'tion, and vaiious other move- ments founded on the assumption that capital mustf always of necessity bw at war with labor. On this assuin|)tion the workingman is invited to align himself w.th this or that movement, and by so do- ing better his en ition. Now, there was a time when to a certain extent labor was at war with capital. That was the time when the Democratic party said c ipital had a right tob.iy and own labor. The Republican party, composed as it was of work- ingmen, took the opposite view, and said the con- verse of th-i proposition is true, and that instead of capital owning tlie laborer, the laborer should own the ca|)itul, as mu h of it as possible; and for the past thirty years that party has done everything to help him to take t lat position with regard to capi- tal. A high protective tariff gives high wages to the workm m, and, so long as his tea and coffee, his beef and flour, his hou-ie rent and doctor's bills, and nine-tenths of his clothii g pay no duty, the co*t of living is not perceptibly increased by the tariff. By reason of the protective tariff, advocat- ed by Lincoln in 1832 and put in operation under his administration by a Republican Congress, hun- dre 's of thousanr's ot laborers have found com- fortable homes in this country, who, but for that Reput'lican measure, would have had no pecuniary inducement to come t > us across the Atlantic.

Upon thi^ que tion of the relation between labor and capital, which to-day perplexes the minds of a gooii many hone?t men, we are not left without words of gu dance from the sagacious and far-see- ing Lincoln In his message to Congress in Decem- ber, 1861, no' w thstanding the public mind was intent ui>oii the pro-ecution of the war, he spoke of the attempt of the Confederacy to place capital on an equal footing, if not above labor, and enum- erated fallacious assumptions on which they pro- ceeded. He said they assumed that labor is avdil- able only in com ection with capital ; that nobody labors unless induced thereto by somebody else owning capital, either by hiring or owning the laborer ; that w hoever is a hired laborer is flxed in that condition tor life. "Now," he said, "there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed ; nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired labo er. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless. Labor is piior to and independent of cipital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have exist- ed if labor h.ad not first existed. Labor is the supe- rior of capital, and deserves much the hiiiher con- sideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights." He s id a few men possess capital, and with their capital hire another few to labor for them, but a large majority North and South, were neither masters nor si IV. s, hirers nor hired. Men, with their fami- lies, wives, sons, and daughters, work f"r them- selves on their farn^s, in their houses, and in their shops, tik'ng their whole product to themselves, and asking no favors of capital on tue one hand or hired laborers on the other.

"Again," Mr. Lincoln repeat-, "there is not of necessity any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixe to that condition for life," and then he ailded in words, whic'i, though I read them first while in carnf) in Vi -uiiiii more than twenty-five years ago, I think I shall never forget because they ure so true of our people: ".Many independent men eveiywhere in these states a fiw yeirs bick in

�� �