of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but
has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it 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."

As the reader watched for the effect of this exordium he only saw
disapproval and consternation. His assembled advisers and critics, each
and all save only the fiery Herndon, protested that language so daring
and advanced would work a ruin that might not be mended in years.
Lincoln heard their condemnation with gravity rather than surprise. But
he had worked his way to a conviction, and he was immovable; all he said
was, that the statement was true, right, and just, that it was time it
should be made, and that he would make it, even though he might have "to
go down with it;" that he would "rather be defeated with this expression
in the speech ... than to be victorious without it." Accordingly, on the
next day he spoke the paragraph without the change of a word.

It is not without effort that we can now appreciate fully why this
utterance was so momentous in the spring of 1858.[77] By it Lincoln came
before the people with a plain statement of precisely that which more
than nine hundred and ninety-nine persons in every thousand, especially
at the North, were striving with all their might to stamp down as an
untruth; he said to them what they all were denying with desperation,
and with rage against the asserters. Their bitterness was the greater
because very many, in the bottom of their hearts, distrusted their own
painful and strenuous denial. No words could be more unpopular than that
the divided house could not permanently stand, when the whole nation was
insisting, with the intensity of despair, that it could stand, would
stand, must stand. Consequently occurrences soon showed his friends to
be right so far as concerned the near, practical point: t