Douglas won the Legislature and the senatorship, though Lincoln won the popular majority. When he was asked how he felt about his defeat, he answered: "I feel as the boy did when he stubbed his toe,--he was too big to cry, and it hurt too bad to laugh!" The country at large, which had closely watched the debate, forgot him for two years. Early in 1860 he was invited to lecture in New York. He was not regarded as a Presidential candidate; and when he appeared,--in clothes full of creases from his carpet-bag, with no press copy of his speech and not expecting the newspapers to report it--he was such a figure as to his audience in Cooper Institute seemed to give little promise. But he carried them with him completely, and the next morning the seven-column report in the _Tribune_ told the country that in this man there was a new force to reckon with. The speech ranks with the great historical orations of the country. The first part was a careful review of the position which the signers of the Constitution took in their individual capacity as to the right of Congress to regulate or exclude slavery from the territories. He showed by specific proof that of the thirty-nine signers twenty-one voted definitely on various occasions for Congressional Acts which did so exclude or regulate slavery; and that of the remaining eighteen almost all were known to have held the same opinion. This was a masterly refutation of the claim of Douglas and the Democracy that the fathers of the nation were on their side as to the territorial question. Lincoln then passed to a broader view, and inquired: What can we do that will really satisfy the South? Every word is sober, temperate, well-weighed. The South, he showed, is really taking very little interest now in the Territories. It is excited about the John Brown raid, and accuses the Republican party of responsibility for that. But not a single Republican was implicated in the raid--not one. You, said Lincoln, addressing the South--interpret your constitutional rights in a different way from what we do, and say if we do not admit your interpretation,--if we elect a Republican president,--you will break up the Union. But this is simply the highwayman's plea. What, then, can we Republicans do to satisfy the South? We must not only let them alone, but somehow convince them that we do let them alone. In a word, this and this only will convince them; we must cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly,--done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated; we must place ourselves avowedly with them. "Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free-State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from