Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the man _before_ the dollar. I remember being once amused much at seeing two partially intoxicated men engage in a fight with their great coats on, which fight, after a long and rather harmless contest, ended in each having fought himself out of his own coat and into that of the other. If the two leading parties of this day are really identical with the two in the days of Jefferson and Adams, they have performed the same feat as the two drunken men.... The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society, and yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them ‘glittering generalities.’ Another bluntly calls them ‘self-evident lies.’ And others insidiously argue that they apply to ‘superior races.’... This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it. All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and the capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression. Your obedient servant, A. LINCOLN.” After that no man might claim that he had not bared his soul. Editors, political leaders, personal friends, vainly attempted during the Presidential campaign to draw from him some public expression of opinion, some hint of what was going on in his mind while the national horizon flamed with passion and threats of war were openly made by the slaveholders. But he knew that it would not pay to say a word that might complicate a question so clear. The American people were sound at heart. If the issue could be confined to the question of whether slavery was morally right or wrong, the common people could be depended upon to vote against spreading it to the free territories. Lincoln’s confidence in the plain people grew with years. In spite of his shrewd experience in politics he was free from cynicism. There was a childlike simplicity in his character, a central purity and earnestness, that enabled him to see under the broadcloth and ruffles of the East the same elemental humanity he had known under the deerhide, jeans and coonskins of the West.