The San Francisco call., 1898-02-13


 wise in its choice of representatives. but it's purposes have ever been high and patriotic.
 It was officered at its inception by captains, whose names now stand high on the roll call of fame-Sum- ner and Wilson and Fessenden and Hale of New England; Seward and Greeley and Curtis in New York; Winter Davis and Cassius Clay and the Blairs in the border States; Chase and Wade and Giddings and Trumbull in the Northwest; Baker on the Pacific.
 There were giants in the land in those days. intellectual caryatides who upheld their age. Small men with large bank accounts had not then excluded large men with small bank accounts from the high places of state. The pretorian guards of politics had not then inaugurated the practice of shamelessly selling Senatorial togas to metallic acci- dents, whose dense and unsensitive egotism made them unaware that a seat In the United States Senate is not of itself distinction, but only an opportunity to achieve it. The passage of the Kansas Nebraska bill made no longer available the honeyed glue of compromise with which Henry Clay had so often monious alliance, and in 1856, for the first time in our history, the forces of freedom and slavery were aligned for battle. Candidates for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency were numerous, but the chief contest was between Douglas and Buchanan. Douglas was com. paratively young, his fidelity to slavery had not been tested, the shareholders needed the Keystone State, and they selected the morally cartilaginous and mentally unossi- fled Pennsylvanian as an affable availability. Out of the ultimate West came Fremont to lead the forces of freedom. Pathfinder was he, seeking untrodden ways in poli- tics as in the exploration of noun tain and desert. With the light of freedom in his loyal eyes and the bronze of Western suns on the face that never feared a foe or shirked contest, he led the Republican party to a battle which, though lost, yet proved the Bunker Hill of our new revolution. The contest of 1856 was the midnight sun of an enamel pated North, for it's setting rays glowed with the presage of vic- tory that was to bring the illumina- tion of freedom to a nation.
 Four years of fruitless struggle, fasten itself on the new North west. and then the hour of tri- umph arrived. A leader of leaders was needed, and all eyes were turned toward Illinois. A man for the times was demanded, and the God of the eternities presented him in the person of Abraham Lin- coln.
 He was the child of poverty and toll. Not the hopeless poverty ana cringing toll of those who labor amid the din of European marts, but the manly submission to priva- tion. and unmastered toll Of the Western pioneer, whose eye of faith beholds the star of hope shining above the clouds, and who in his dreams of the future drapes himself with the Senator's toga or the Judges gown. Abraham Lincoln was self-made and self-reliant, but never self-seeking CT self-sufflcient. He was honest, not with that nur- tured integrity which too often proves an exotic that dies at the first blast of diversity, but he was honest by instinct, and because it never occurred to him to be other than honest. He was in spirit as in fact one of and one with the peo- nle. and he needed no guide to find the way to their hearts. He loved liberty of action, of speech ana or thought. and in so far as his gener- ous and chivalric soul would suffer him to hate anything, he hated tyr amy and meanness and shams. His was a personality so vital that 1t cannot die, and after all these years he seems a living presence rather than a memory. He was master of speech, his passion and pathos and humor were matchless, and as as a logician he was peerless. His iron-limbed syllogisms crushed sophisms as if they were eggshells. His wit, his philosophy, his, strong saving common sense, his quaint forms of expression have filled our political literature with familiar apothegms. What better rebuke to dogmatism than the phrase, "Ev- erybody is wiser than anybody; what clearer description of a repub- lie than government of the people, by the people, for the people" What more complete destruction of sophism than his answer to the con- tention of his opponent than slav- cry must be excluded from terri tory by unfriendly legislation.
 Judge Douglas said he, holds that thing may be lawfully driven away from place where it has lawful right to go." What annihi- lating sarcasm in his reply to those who insisted that Republican vic- tory would entail negro equality and miscegenation. Because I do not want a colored woman for my slave" said he. "it does not follow that do want her for my wife. My understanding is that can just let her alone"