The other broke the chains of superstition and filled the world with intellectual light and he is known to us as Charles Darwin.

Because of these men the nineteenth century is illustrious.

Every generation has its heroes, its iconoclasts, its pioneers, its ideals. The people always have been and still are divided, at least into two classes-the many, who with their backs to the sunshine, worship the past and the few' who keep their faces to the dawn-the many, who are satisfied with the world as it is; the few, who labor and suffer for the future, for those to be, and who seek to rescue the opressed, to destroy the cruel distinctions of caste, and to civilize mankind.

Yet it somtimes happens that the liberator of one age becomes the oppressor of the next. His reputaton becomes so great-he becomes so revered and worshipped -that the followers in his name attack the hero who endeavors to take another step in advance.

In our country there were for many years two great political parties, and each of these parties had conservatives and extremists. The extremists of the Democratic party were in the rear, and wished to go back; the extremists of the Republican party were in the front, and wished to go forward. The extreme Democrat was willing to destroy the Union for the sake of slavery, and the extreme Republican was willing to destroy the Union for the sake of liberty.

Neither party could succeed without the vote of the extremists.

This was the political situation in 1858-60.

The extreme Democrats would not vote for Douglas

but the extreme Republicans did vote for Lincoln. Lincoln occupied the middle ground, and was the compromise candidate of his own party. He had lived for many years in the intellectual territory of compromise -in a part of our country settled by Northern aud Southern men-where Northern and Southern ideas met. and the ideals of the two sections were brought together and compared.

The sympathies of Lincoln, his ties of kindrd, were with the South. His conviction, his sense of justice, and his ideals, were with the North. He knew the horrors of slavery; and he felt the unspeakable ecstacies and glories of freedom.

He had the kindness, the gentleness. of true greatness, and he could not have been a master; he had the marhood and independence of true greatness, and he couli not have been a slave.

He was just, and he was incapable of putting a burden upon others that he himself would not willingly. bear.

He was merciful and profound, and it was not necessary for him to read the history of the world to know that liberty and slavery could not live in the same nation or in the same brain.

The Republc had reached a crisis, the conflict between Liberty and Slavery could no longer be delayed. From the heights of philosophy-standing above the contending hosts, above the prejudices, above the sertimentalities of this day-Lincoln was good enough and brave enough and wise enough to utter these prophetic words.

EARLY HOME OF THE LINCOLNS IN ILLINOIS.

Located in Macon County, in the Sangamon Valley, about ten miles from Decatur. It was here, during the first year, that Abraham Ancoln and John Hanks apift several thousand rails. Lincoln was about twenty years of age at this time.

"A house divided against itself can not stand, I believe this country can not permanently endure half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all the one thing or the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction or its advocates will push it farther until it becomes alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South."

This declaration was the standard around which gathered the grandest political party that the world has ever seen, and this declaration made Lincoln the leader of that vast host. '

In this, the first great crisis, Lincoln uttered the victorious truth that made him the foremost man in the Republic.

Then came another crisis-the crisis of secession and civil war.

Again Lincoln spoke the deepest feeling and the highest thought of the Nation. In his first message he said: "The central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy."

He also showed conclusively that the North and South, in spite of secession, must remain face to face-that physically they could not separate that they must have more or less commerce, and that this commerce must be carried on, either between the two sections as friends or aliens.

This situation and its consequences he pointed out to absolute perfection in these words:

"Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws! Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws among friends!"

After having stated fully and fairly the philosophy of the conflict, after having said enough to satisfy any calm and thoughtful mind, he addressed himself to the hearts of America. Probably there are fewer and finer passages of literature than the close of Lincoln's first message:

"I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic chords.of memory stretching from every battle-field and patriotic grave to every loving heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

These noble, these touching, these pathetic words, were delivered in the presence of rebellion, in the midst of spies and conspirators-surrounded by friends, most of whom were unknown and some of whom were wavering in their fidelity-at a time when secession was ar rogant and organized, when patriotism was silent, and when, to quote the expressive words of Lincoln himself, "Sinners were calling the righteous to repentance."

When Lincoln became President he was held in contempt by the South-underrated by the North and East -not appreciated even by his Cabinet-and yet he was not only one of the wisest but one of the shrewdest of mankind. Knowing that he had the right to enforce the laws of the Union in all parts of the United States and Territories-knowing, as he did, that the secessionists.