So the difficulty appeared in his time, and it should hardly be necessary to point out that no period of modern history has been more in need of this little homily on the subject of definition than the first half of the twentieth century. The relationship between words and essences did then occur to Lincoln as a problem, and we can show how he was influenced in one highly important particular by his attention to this relationship. Fairly early in his struggle against Douglas and others whom he conceived to be the foes of the Union, Lincoln became convinced that the perdurability of laws and other institutions is bound up with the acceptance of the principle of contradiction. Or, if that seems an unduly abstract way of putting the matter, let us say that he came to repudiate, as firmly as anyone in practical politics may do, those people who try by relativistic interpretations and other sophistries to evade the force of some basic principles. The heart of Lincoln’s statesmanship, indeed, lay in his perception that on some matters one has to say “Yes” or “No,” that one has to accept an alternative to the total exclusion of the other, and that any weakness in being thus bold is a betrayal. Let us examine some of the stages by which this conviction grew upon him. It seems not generally appreciated that this position comprises the essence of the celebrated “House Divided” speech, delivered before the Republican State Convention at Springfield, June 16, 1858. There he said: “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”[104] How manifest it is that Lincoln’s position was not one of “tolerance,” as that word is vulgarly understood today. It was a definite insistence upon right, with no regard for latitude and longitude in moral questions. For Lincoln such questions could neither be relativistically decided nor held in abeyance. There was no middle ground. In the light of American political tradition the stand is curiously absolute, but it is there—and it is genuinely expressive of Lincoln’s matured view. Douglas had made the fatal mistake of looking for a position in the excluded middle. He had been trying to get slavery admitted into the territories by feigning that the institution was morally indifferent. His platform declaration had been that he did not care “whether it is voted up or voted down” in the territories. That statement made a fine opening for Lincoln, which he used as follows in his reply at Alton: