Douglas was, in very truth, imbued with little of mere sentiment. He gave little time to discussions belonging solely to the realm of the speculative or the abstract. He was in no sense a dreamer. What Coleridge has defined wisdom--"common sense, in an uncommon degree"--was his. In phrase the simplest and most telling, he struck at once at the very core of the controversy. Possibly no man was ever less inclined "to darken counsel with words without knowledge." Positive, and aggressive to the last degree, he never sought "by indirections to find directions out." In statesmanship-- in all that pertained to human affairs--he was intensely practical. With him, in the words of Macaulay, "one acre in Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia." It is a pleasure to recall--after the lapse of half a century--the two men as they shook hands upon the speaker's stand, just before the opening of the debates that were to mark an epoch in American history. Stephen A. Douglas! Abraham Lincoln! As they stood side by side and looked out upon "the sea of upturned faces"--it was indeed a picture to live in the memory of all who witnessed it. The one stood for the old ordering of things, in an emphatic sense for the Government as established by the fathers--with all its compromises. The other, recognizing equally with his opponent the binding force of Constitutional obligation, yet looking, away from present surroundings, "felt the inspiration of the coming of the grander day." As has been well said, "The one faced the past; the other, the future."