al contrivances wherewith we are so
industriously plied and belabored, contrivances such as groping for some
middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a
man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy
of 'don't care,' on a question about which all true men do care; such as
Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to disunionists;
reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the
righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring
men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did. Neither
let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor
frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government nor of
dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in
that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

The close attention bestowed on its delivery, the hearty applause that
greeted its telling points, and the enthusiastic comments of the
Republican journals next morning showed that Lincoln's Cooper Institute
speech had taken New York by storm. It was printed in full in four of
the leading New York dailies, and at once went into large circulation in
carefully edited pamphlet editions. From New York, Lincoln made a tour
of speech-making through several of the New England States, and was
everywhere received with enthusiastic welcome and listened to with an
eagerness that bore a marked result in their spring elections. The
interest of the factory men who listened to these addresses was equaled,
perhaps excelled, by the gratified surprise of college professors when
they heard the style and method of a popular Western orator that would
bear the test of their professional criticism and compare with the best
examples in their standard text-books.

The attitude of the Democratic party in the coming presidential campaign
was now also rapidly taking shape. Great curiosity existed whether the
radical differences between its Northern and Southern wings could by any
possibility be removed or adjusted, whether the adherents of Douglas and
those of Buchanan could be brought to join in a common platform and in
the support of a single candidate. The Democratic leaders in the
Southern States had become more and more out-spoken in their pro-slavery
demands. They had advanced step by step from the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise in 1854, the attempt to capture Kansas b