The result of this celebrated canvass was to return Douglas to the Senate, although the vote of the people was in favor of Lincoln. The Legislative districts in the State had been so arranged by the Democratic party as to secure their majority in the Legislature. But even if the popular majority had been with Douglas, Mr. Lincoln had won. He set out to lose the State; he set out to carry the nation; and he did it. It was the foresight of the statesman, contending with the cunning of the politician. It was part of the victory that he who really lost thought he had won. Mr. Herndon, Mr. Lincoln's law partner, told afterwards how Mr. Lincoln came home and said, "Billy, I knew I should miss the place, when I competed for it. _This defeat will make me President._" In the period between this canvass and the Presidential nomination at Chicago, Mr. Lincoln, while at work in his profession, did good service in the cause of freedom in several of the States, making a number of effective speeches in Ohio, Kansas, and particularly in New England and New York. His contest with Douglas had probably already made Mr. Lincoln the second choice of large numbers of Republicans for the nomination of 1860. His great speech at Cooper Institute in February, 1860, confirmed this choice, and enlarged those numbers. The invitation which resulted in his great Cooper Institute speech was originally to give a lecture in Plymouth Church, in Brooklyn, and he was to receive $200 for it. After some delay, at last he agreed to speak on February 27th; but the three young men who had organized the course, thought the time late in the season, and began to fear that they would lose money. It sounds curious enough now, to think of a fear lest a speech by Mr. Lincoln should not refund $350 expenses, but so they thought. A political friend of his who had negotiated the engagement, at last assumed one fourth of the risk, and with a good deal of trouble, managed to have the speech at Cooper Institute, instead of Brooklyn. Attempts were vainly made to induce one and then another Republican club to assume the risk of the engagement. The New York Times, in announcing the lecture, kindly spoke of the speaker as "a lawyer who had some local reputation in Illinois." The Cooper Institute speech was prepared with much care, and was a production of very great power of logic, history and political statement. It consisted of an exposition of the true doctrines of the founders of our nation on the question of slavery, and of the position of the two parties of the day on the same question. It was alive and luminous throughout with the resolute and lofty and uncompromising morality on principle, which had colored all his debates with Douglas, and made a very deep impression upon the audience present, and upon the far greater audience that read it afterwards.