--to reject all progress, all improvement. What
I do say is, that if we would supplant the opinions and policy of
our fathers in any case, we should do so upon evidence so
conclusive, and argument so clear, that even their great
authority, fairly considered and weighed, cannot stand; and most
surely not in a case, whereof we ourselves declare they understood
the question better than we.

If any part of the audience came with the expectation of hearing the
rhetorical fire-works of a Western stump-speaker of the "half-horse,
half-alligator" variety, they met novelty of an unlooked for kind. In
Lincoln's entire address he neither introduced an anecdote nor essayed
a witticism; and the first half of it does not contain even an
illustrative figure or a poetical fancy. It was the quiet, searching
exposition of the historian, and the terse, compact reasoning of the
statesman, about an abstract principle of legislation, in language
well-nigh as restrained and colorless as he would have employed in
arguing a case before a court. Yet such was the apt choice of words,
the easy precision of sentences, the simple strength of propositions,
the fairness of every point he assumed, and the force of every
conclusion he drew, that his listeners followed him with the interest
and delight a child feels in its easy mastery of a plain sum in
arithmetic.

With the sympathy and confidence of his audience thus enlisted,
Lincoln next took up the more prominent topics in popular thought, and
by words of kindly admonition and protest addressed to the people of
the South, showed how impatiently, unreasonably, and unjustly they
were charging the Republican party with sectionalism, with radicalism,
with revolutionary purpose, with the John Brown raid, and kindred
political offenses, not only in the absence of any acts to justify
such charges, but even in the face of its emphatic and constant
denials and disavowals. The illustration with which he concluded this
branch of his theme could not well be surpassed in argumentative
force.

But you will not abide the election of a Republican President! In
that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then
you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us!
That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters
through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and
then you will be a murderer!" To be sure what th