"
Now the adoption of the Missouri Compromise was the hardest blow ever
inflicted on the cause of free soil in America. It did more to
encourage the supporters of slavery and to discourage its opponents
than anything else that ever happened. Its restoration would
undoubtedly have produced a similar effect. Although he is not to be
credited with any philanthropic motive, Stephen A. Douglas did an
effective work for freedom when he helped to overthrow that measure.
Leading Abolitionists have accorded him that meed of praise.
But there was that proposition which Mr. Lincoln was so fond of
repeating, that the nation could not remain half free and half
slave--"a divided house"--but the remedy he had to propose was not
manumission at any proximate or certain time, but the adoption of a
policy that, to use his own words, would cause "the public mind to
rest in the belief that it [slavery] was in the course of ultimate
extinction." Practically that meant very little or nothing. What the
public mind then needed was not "rest," but properly directed
activity.
But the declarations above quoted were all before Mr. Lincoln had
become President or had probably thought of such a thing.
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