such minor military topics. He
looked carefully after the interests of Illinois in certain grants of
land to that State for railroads, but expressed his desire that the
government price of the reserved sections should not be increased to
actual settlers.

During the first session of the Thirtieth Congress he delivered three
set speeches in the House, all of them carefully prepared and fully
written out. The first of these, on January 12, 1848, was an elaborate
defense of the Whig doctrine summarized in a House resolution passed a
week or ten days before, that the Mexican War "had been unnecessarily
and unconstitutionally commenced by the President," James K. Polk. The
speech is not a mere party diatribe, but a terse historical and legal
examination of the origin of the Mexican War. In the after-light of our
own times which shines upon these transactions, we may readily admit
that Mr. Lincoln and the Whigs had the best of the argument, but it must
be quite as readily conceded that they were far behind the President and
his defenders in political and party strategy. The former were clearly
wasting their time in discussing an abstract question of international
law upon conditions existing twenty months before. During those twenty
months the American arms had won victory after victory, and planted the
American flag on the "halls of the Montezumas." Could even successful
argument undo those victories or call back to life the brave American
soldiers who had shed their blood to win them?

It may be assumed as an axiom that Providence has never gifted any
political party with all of political wisdom or blinded it with all of
political folly. Upon the foregoing point of controversy the Whigs were
sadly thrown on the defensive, and labored heavily under their already
discounted declamation. But instinct rather than sagacity led them to
turn their eyes to the future, and successfully upon other points to
retrieve their mistake. Within six weeks after Lincoln's speech
President Polk sent to the Senate a treaty of peace, under which Mexico
ceded to the United States an extent of territory equal in area to
Germany, France, and Spain combined, and thereafter the origin of the
war was an obsolete question. What should be done with the new territory
was now the issue.

This issue embraced the already exciting slavery question, and Mr.
Lincoln was doubtless gratified that the Whigs had taken a position upon
it so consonant with his ow