d that "when Herndon was very young--probably before Mr.
Lincoln made his first protest in the Legislature of the State in behalf
of liberty--Lincoln once said to him: 'I cannot see what makes your
convictions so decided as regards the future of slavery. What tells you
the thing must be rooted out?' 'I feel it in my bones,' was Herndon's
emphatic answer. 'This continent is not broad enough to endure the
contest between freedom and slavery!' It was almost in these very words
that Lincoln afterwards opened the great contest with Douglas. From this
time forward he submitted all public questions to what he called 'the
test of Bill Herndon's _bone philosophy_'; and their arguments were
close and protracted."

Lincoln's attitude on slavery aroused formidable opposition among his
friends, and even in his own family. Mrs. Lincoln was decidedly
pro-slavery in her views. Once while riding with a friend she said: "If
my husband dies, his spirit will never find me residing outside the
limits of a slave State." But opposition, whether from without or
within, could never swerve him from a course to which conscience and
reason clearly impelled him. Long before Mr. Herndon published the call
for the Bloomington convention, he had said to a deputation of men from
Chicago, in answer to the inquiry whether Lincoln could be trusted for
freedom: "Can you trust yourselves? If you can, you can trust Lincoln
forever."

The convention met at Bloomington, May 29, 1856. One of its chief
incidents was a speech by Lincoln. This speech was one of the great
efforts of his life, and had a powerful influence on the convention.
"Never," says one of the delegates, "was an audience more completely
electrified by human eloquence. Again and again his hearers sprang to
their feet, and by long continued cheers expressed how deeply the
speaker had aroused them." "It was there," says Mr. Herndon in one of
his lectures, "that Lincoln was baptized and joined our church. He made
a speech to us. I have heard or read all of Mr. Lincoln's great
speeches; and I give it as my opinion that the Bloomington speech was
the grand effort of his life. Heretofore, and up to this moment, he had
simply argued the slavery question on grounds of policy,--on what are
called the _statesman's_ grounds,--never reaching the question of the
radical and eternal right. Now he was newly baptized and freshly born;
he had the fervor of a new convert; the smothered flame broke out;
enthusia