axioms. The
principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society.
And yet they are denied and evaded with no small show of success. One
dashingly calls them 'glittering generalities.' Another bluntly calls
them 'self-evident lies.' And others insidiously argue that they apply
to 'superior races.' These expressions, differing in form, are identical
in object and effect--the supplanting the principles of free government,
and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would
delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people. They
are the vanguard, the miners and sappers of returning despotism. We must
repulse them, or they will subjugate us. This is a world of
compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no
slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves,
and, under a just God, cannot long retain it."

Douglas's quarrel with the Buchanan administration had led many
Republicans to hope that they might be able to utilize his name and his
theory of popular sovereignty to aid them in their local campaigns.
Lincoln knew from his recent experience the peril of this delusive party
strategy, and was constant and earnest in his warnings against adopting
it. In a little speech after the Chicago municipal election on March 1,
1859, he said:

"If we, the Republicans of this State, had made Judge Douglas our
candidate for the Senate of the United States last year, and had elected
him, there would to-day be no Republican party in this Union.... Let the
Republican party of Illinois dally with Judge Douglas, let them fall in
behind him and make him their candidate, and they do not absorb him--he
absorbs them. They would come out at the end all Douglas men, all
claimed by him as having indorsed every one of his doctrines upon the
great subject with which the whole nation is engaged at this hour--that
the question of negro slavery is simply a question of dollars and
cents? that the Almighty has drawn a line across the continent, on one
side of which labor--the cultivation of the soil--must always be
performed by slaves. It would be claimed that we, like him, do not care
whether slavery is voted up or voted down. Had we made him our candidate
and given him a great majority, we should never have heard an end of
declarations by him that we had indorsed all these dogmas."

To a Kansas friend he wrote on May 14, 1859:

"You will probably adopt res