ent into
the crucible commonplace; they came out of it heroic stuff. All over the
country the churches were open every night in the week. Moving across
the country the traveller saw the candles burning in the little
schoolhouses, while the farmers assembled to pray and read God's word.
The Fulton Street prayer-meeting in New York attracted the interest of
the nation. The morning newspapers of 1858 carried columns concerning
the business men's noon prayer-meeting, just as to-day they carry the
column on the stock news and the stock market. In his "History of the
United States" Rhodes calls attention to the fact that 230 persons
joined Plymouth Church on profession of faith on a single Sunday
morning. That revival all over the land put its moral stamp upon boys
and girls who afterwards became the leaders of the generation.

Now every reform and every great war for principle proceeds along
intellectual lines clearly laid out. Twenty-seven years before the
Lincoln-Douglas debates, the "Tariff of Abominations" had brought up the
question of the right of the Southern states to secede. Calhoun had set
up his famous doctrine, and Webster, in his "Second Reply to Hayne," had
knocked it down. The feeling had been intense, but Webster's wonderful
oration in defense of the Constitution and the Union had succeeded in
meeting the crisis, and settling for a time the vexing problem. Yet the
evil of slavery continued its fatal gnawing at the heart of the nation.
By 1855-6 the old question was up again in much the same form. The
atmosphere was clouded, the black shroud of the approaching storm
already discernible on the horizon. A hundred minor problems united in
complicating the discussion of the one all-important thing. Another
leader was wanted to set the battle in array, to mark out the lines of
conflict. Webster and Calhoun were gone, but another was to come to
preserve "liberty and union, one and inseparable." This man was Abraham
Lincoln, and the opponent who was to call out his clearest expositions
of the situation, and spur him on to his greatest arguments, was
Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois.

Douglas was born in 1813, in Brandon, Vermont. His father was a
physician of great promise, who fell with a stroke of apoplexy at a
moment when he was carrying the child Stephen in his arms. The ambitions
of the father for intellectual leadership were fulfilled in the son, who
at fifteen years of age had attracted the notice of the best m