The great leaders of these Northern parties were Stephen H. Douglas and William H. Seward. Mr. Douglas was the best practical politician, popular debater, and magnetizer of the masses, the North has yet produced. _He was the representative of the blind power of the North_, and stood up all his life, in his better hours, for the right of the people to make the republic what they would. But the representative statesman of the era is the Secretary of State. The whole career of Mr. Seward is so interwoven with the history of the political consolidation of the people against the Slave Power, that the two must be studied together to be understood. Nowhere so clearly and eloquently as in the pages of this great philosophical statesman can be read the rapid growth of that political movement that in twelve years captured every Free State, placed a President in the chair, and then, with a splendid generosity, invited the whole loyal people to unite in a party of the Union, _knowing that henceforth the Union meant the people and liberty against the aristocracy and slavery_. And only in the light of this view can the course of this man and his great seeming opponent, but real associate, be fitly displayed. _Douglas had taught the people of the North that their will should be the law of the republic. Seward had told them that will should be in accordance with the 'higher law' of justice and freedom._ Like men fighting in the dark, they supposed themselves each other's enemies, while they were only commanders of the front and rear of the army of the people. Both appeared on the national arena in the struggle of 1850, and soon strode to the first place. The Slave Power repudiated Seward and his 'higher law' of justice and liberty at once. They tolerated Douglas and his 'popular sovereignty ' ten years longer, when they found it even a more dangerous heresy, and threw him overboard. In the election of 1860 there were but two parties--the two wings of the people's army, under the patriots Lincoln and Douglas; the two wings of the slave host, under the traitors Breckinridge and Bell. Of course the people triumphed. Had Douglas been elected instead of Lincoln, the Slave Power would not have stayed in the Union one hour longer. _It was not Lincoln, but the political supremacy of the people they resisted._ The Free States had at last consolidated, never to recede, and that was enough. Henceforth no party could live in the North that espoused the cause of this rebel aristocracy. Whoever was Governor or President, Democrat, Republican, Union, what not, the people's party was henceforth supreme, and the aristocracy, with all its works of darkness, was second best.