ary to the Declaration of Independence; and maintains that there is
no right principle of action but self-interest.... No man is good enough
to govern another man without the other's consent.... I object to the
Nebraska Bill because it assumes there can be moral right in the
enslaving of one man by another."

He was a candidate for United States Senator in 1855, but his withdrawal
from the contest gave the election to Mr. Trumbull. In 1856 he received
one hundred and ten votes for vice-president at the first Republican
national contention, and canvassed the State as one of the presidential
electors. During this canvass he said:

"Sometimes when I am speaking I feel that the time is soon coming when
the sun shall shine and the rain fall on no man who shall go forth to
unrequited toil.... How it will come about, when it will come, I cannot
tell; but that time will surely come."

The Supreme Court of the United States, on March 6, 1857, committed
itself to the perpetuation of slavery in the "Dred Scott" decision, and
that act, together with the question of admitting Kansas to the Union as
a slave or free State, furnished the argument for the legislative
campaign of 1858, in which Lincoln was a candidate for United States
senator against Stephen A. Douglas. In his speech accepting the
nomination he, in referring to the agitation for the abolition of
slavery, said:

"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."

On May 16, 1860, the second Republican national convention met in
Chicago, and on the third ballot nominated Lincoln for the presidency
over William H. Seward, who was at that time the idol of the radical
element of the party. Not many who listened to the clergyman who
delivered the prayer at the opening of the convention, gave serious
thought to these prophetic words as they fell from his lips:

"We entreat Thee that at some future, but no distant, day the evil which
now invests the body politic shall not only have been arrested in its
progress, but wholly eradicated from the system."

The Northern Democrats nominated Stephen A. Douglas; the slave-holding,
Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckenridge, and a Constitutional