They regarded the Republican candidate for the Presidency as the embodiment of all their apprehended woes, and so they poured out upon him without stint their bitterest execrations. In this they were encouraged by the outrageous cartoons of _Harper’s Weekly_. In one of its issues he was depicted in ludicrous, not to say horrible, uncouthness of figure, as drunk in a bar-room. The moral turpitude of such a representation was simply unspeakable when we remember that Mr. Lincoln in his boyhood promised his mother that he would never drink intoxicating liquor and had sacredly kept his word. In another issue of the _Weekly_ he was portrayed as frightened by ghosts, his shocky hair standing on end. So, sustained by a widely read Northern journal in their grotesque and monstrous representations of Mr. Lincoln, many of them, not all, emptied upon him a flood of billingsgate. Some in common conversation, others in their political harangues on the stump, called him an idiot, a buffoon, a baboon, the Illinois ape, a gorilla. But in St. Louis there were from fifty to sixty thousand Germans, and they were almost solidly Republican. During this vituperative presidential canvass they invited Carl Schurz to address them and their fellow-citizens, on the burning question of the hour. He was not as widely known then as he afterwards became; still he had already acquired considerable reputation as a political speaker. Moreover, he came to us from a free state, and a host of men in the city were anxious to hear what this German from Wisconsin had to say to them concerning our great national problem. In the evening of the first of August, 1860, he appeared in Verandah Hall. Fully three thousand enthusiastic souls were there to greet him and hear him. He spoke, as was his custom, from manuscript. His subject was, “The Doom of Slavery.” With rare lucidity and forcefulness he justly stated the position of slavery and showed that, from its very nature, it could not permit men on its own soil freely to discuss it; nor could it safely permit the slaves to be educated except for servants, lest thereby there might be engendered within them aspirations for freedom incompatible with involuntary servitude; nor could slavery favor the development of domestic industries, since that would build up the free states more rapidly than their own, and so disturb the political equilibrium of the Republic; and for the same reason slavery could not consent to be kept out of the territories of the Northwest. In contrast with this, he stated with equal clearness and cogency the position of free labor. It requires the highest advantages, educational and industrial, for all; instead of class privileges it demands privileges that are universal. He showed the utter incompatibility of slavery and free labor.