excuse me for remaining in Illinois, where much hard work is still to
be done.

Yours very truly,

A. LINCOLN.

AFTER THE DEMOCRATIC VICTORY OF BUCHANAN

FRAGMENT OF SPEECH AT A REPUBLICAN BANQUET IN CHICAGO, DECEMBER 10, 1856.

We have another annual Presidential message. Like a rejected lover making
merry at the wedding of his rival, the President felicitates himself
hugely over the late Presidential election. He considers the result a
signal triumph of good principles and good men, and a very pointed rebuke
of bad ones. He says the people did it. He forgets that the "people," as
he complacently calls only those who voted for Buchanan, are in a minority
of the whole people by about four hundred thousand votes--one full tenth
of all the votes. Remembering this, he might perceive that the "rebuke"
may not be quite as durable as he seems to think--that the majority may
not choose to remain permanently rebuked by that minority.

The President thinks the great body of us Fremonters, being ardently
attached to liberty, in the abstract, were duped by a few wicked and
designing men. There is a slight difference of opinion on this. We think
he, being ardently attached to the hope of a second term, in the concrete,
was duped by men who had liberty every way. He is the cat's-paw. By much
dragging of chestnuts from the fire for others to eat, his claws are burnt
off to the gristle, and he is thrown aside as unfit for further use.
As the fool said of King Lear, when his daughters had turned him out of
doors, "He 's a shelled peascod" ("That 's a sheal'd peascod").

So far as the President charges us "with a desire to change the domestic
institutions of existing States," and of "doing everything in our power to
deprive the Constitution and the laws of moral authority," for the whole
party on belief, and for myself on knowledge, I pronounce the charge an
unmixed and unmitigated falsehood.

Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion
can change the government practically just so much. Public opinion, on any
subject, always has a "central idea," from which all its minor thoughts
radiate. That "central idea" in our political public opinion at the
beginning was, and until recently has continued to be, "the equality
of men." And although it has always submitted patiently to whatever of
inequality there seemed to be as matter of actual necessity, its constant
working has been a steady progress t