in the
ready command of a language never, indeed, ornate or imaginative, and
sometimes of the quality of political commonplace, but always forcible
and always intelligible to his audience. Lincoln had the sense of words,
the imagination, the intensity of feeling, which go to the making of
great literature; but for his masterpieces he always needed time. His
voice was high and strained, his gestures ungraceful, his manner
painful, save in the recital of those passages which he had carefully
prepared or when he was freed of his self-consciousness by anger or
enthusiasm. Neither of them, in any single speech, could be compared to
Webster in the other of the two most famous American debates, but the
series was a remarkable exhibition of forensic power. The interest grew
as the struggle lengthened. People traveled great distances to hear
them. At every meeting-place, a multitude of farmers and dwellers in
country towns, with here and there a sprinkling of city-folk, crowded
about the stand where "Old Abe" and the "Little Giant" turned and
twisted and fenced for an opening, grappled and drew apart, clinched and
strained and staggered,--but neither fell. The wonder grew that Lincoln
stood up so well under the onslaughts of Douglas, at once skillful and
reckless, held him off with so firm a hand, gripped him so shrewdly.
Now, the wonder is that Douglas, wrestling with the man and the cause of
a century, kept his feet and held his own.

He was fighting, too, with an enemy in the rear. When he turned to
strike at the administration, Lincoln would call out: "Go it, husband!
Go it, bear!" Apart from that diversion, however, the debate, long and
involved as it was, followed but three general lines. The whole is
resolvable into three elements,--personalities, politics, and
principles. There were the attacks which each made upon the other's
record; the efforts which each made to weaken the other's position
before the people; and the contrary views which were advanced.

Douglas began, indeed, with gracious compliments to his opponent,
calling him "an amiable, kindly, and intelligent gentleman." Lincoln,
unused to praise from such a source, protested he was like the Hoosier
with the gingerbread: "He reckoned he liked it better than any other
man, and got less of it." But in a moment Douglas was charging that
Lincoln and Trumbull, Whig and Democrat, had made a coalition in 1854 to
form the Black Republican party and get for themselves t