“Nobly and well have you met the expectations of those who, like myself, have waited through four years of silence for your next utterance on the great sin of our times. Highly as I prize the speech, I think your brief and pointed reply to Senator Chesnut fully doubles its value, for all practical purposes.” W. H. Herndon, the able lawyer, associated in business with Abraham Lincoln, wrote from Springfield, Illinois:-- “I have received and read your most philosophic, logical, and classical speech, made in the Senate of the United States. The speech is a withering one to Slavery. It is worthy of you, and you of it. I thank you very, _very_ much for it.… We feel well out here; are confident of success. We hope the East will do as well as the West.” S. M. Booth, journalist, who, spurning the Fugitive Slave Act, helped fugitive slaves, and was sentenced to imprisonment, wrote from “U. S. Custom-House Prison” at Milwaukee:-- “I bless God for the utterance. It is timely and needed at this juncture. I have no sympathy with that craven policy which would suppress such a speech, lest it might prejudice the rights of Kansas or endanger the election of Lincoln.… Your portrait of Slavery is true; its character and effects are all you describe it; and the nation needs to have its own sin and shame mirrored as you have done it. I see, too, the assassins have since sought your life.… You have struck a mighty blow at the very _existence_ of Slavery. You have laid the axe at the root of the tree. We never can reach the evil as long as we fight on the defensive. But if the doctrines of your speech are true, it is no longer a question _where_ or _how far_ Slavery shall go, but whether it shall be allowed to go or to be _anywhere_.… In God’s name let it perish, and the sooner the better.” Hon. A. A. Sargent, delegate from California to the Chicago Convention which nominated Abraham Lincoln as President, and afterwards Representative in Congress from California, wrote from Newburyport, Massachusetts:-- “You go back of mere political distinctions to lay bare the sin and barbarousness of a hoary iniquity, falsely assuming to be a form of Civilization. You have taken up a train of thought, and pursued it well, which I have long wished to have developed, and filled a void in the system of declared truths upon which Republicanism is based, too long neglected. Your speech stirred my heart with feelings of pride for the representative of my native State.” Hon. Neal Dow, eminent in the cause of Temperance, and afterwards a general in the War, wrote from Portland, Maine:--