the levelling of its walls. They are gone. They were a forest of giant oaks; but the resistless hurricane has swept over them, and left only here and there a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage, unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few more gentle breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs a few more ruder storms, and then to sink and be no

MR. LINCOLN'S EARLIEST ANNOUNCEMENT OF HIS POLITICAL OPINIONS.

June, 1836, and March, 1837.

In his letter published in the Sangamon "Journal," in June, 1836, he said: "I go for all sharing the privileges of the government who assist in bearing its burdens: consequently I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage who pay taxes or bear arms [by no means excluding females.]"

FROM HIS PROTEST IN THE JOURNAL OF THE LEGIS LATURE OF ILLINOIS, SIGNED BY MR. LINCOLN AND DAN STONE.

March, 1837.

"THE undersigned believe that the institution. of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy, but that the promulgation of abolition doctrine tends rather to increase than to abate its evils.

"They believe that the Congress of the United States has no power under the Constitution to interfere with the institution of slavery in the different States.

"They believe that the Congress of the United States has the power, under the Constitution, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, but that that power ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people of said district."

EXTRACTS FROM A POLITICAL DEBATE BETWEEN MR. LINCOLN, E. D. BAKER, AND OTHERS, AGAINST STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, JOSIAH LAMBORN, AND OTHERS, HELD IN THE SECOND PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN SPRINGFIELD, IL

LINOIS.

December, 1839.

IN concluding his speech, Mr. Lincoln said: “Mr. Lamborn insists that the difference between the Van Buren party and the Whigs is, that although the former sometimes err in practice, they are always correct in principle, whereas the latter are wrong in principle; and the better to impress this proposition, he uses a figurative expression in these words: The Democrats are vulnerable in the heel, but they are sound in the heart and in the head.' The first branch of the figure that is, that the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel I admit is not merely figuratively but literally true. Who that looks but for a moment at their Swartwouts, their Prices, their Harringtons, and their hundreds of others, scampering away with the public money to Texas, to Europe, and to every spot of the earth where a villain may hope to find refuge from justice, can at all doubt that they are most distressingly

affected in their heels with a species of running fever? It seems that this malady of their heels operates on the sound-headed and honest-hearted creatures very much like the cork leg in the song did on its owner, which, when he had once got started on it, the more he tried to stop it, the more it would run away. At the hazard of wearing this point threadbare, I will relate an anecdote which seems to be too strikingly in point to be omitted. A witty Irish soldier who was always boasting of his bravery when no danger was near, but who invariably, retreated without orders at the first charge of the engagement, being asked by his captain why he did so, replied, 'Captain, I have as brave a heart as Julius Cæsar ever had; but somehow or other, whenever danger approaches, my cowardly legs will run away with it.' So it is with Mr. Lamborn's party. They take the public money into their hands for the most laudable purpose that wise heads and honest hearts can dictate, but before they can possibly get it out again, their rascally vulnerable heels will run away with them.

...

"Mr. Lamborn refers to the late elections in the States, and, from their results, confidently predicts every State in the Union will vote for Mr. Van Buren at the next presidential election.

Address that argument to cowards and knaves ! With the free and the brave it will effect nothing. It may be true: if it must, let it. Many free countries have lost their liberties, and ours may lose hers; but if she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that I never deserted her. I know that the great volcano at Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that reigns there, is belching forth the lava of political corruption in a current broad and deep, which is sweeping with frightful velocity over the whole length and breadth of the land, bidding fair to leave unscathed no green spot or living thing, while on its bosom are riding, like demons on the wave of hell, the imps of that evil spirit, and fiendishly taunting all those who dare to resist its destroying course with the hopelessness of their efforts; and, knowing this, I cannot deny that all may be swept away. Broken by it, I too may be; bow to it, I never will. The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just. It shall not deter me. If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country deserted by all the world