in these days, when all men are free as a matter of course, to read of the fire and fury that arose against the Abolitionists in both the North and the South. A mob of prominent citizens dragged William Lloyd Garrison, one of the first of the Abolitionists, through the streets of Boston with a halter around his body, while in Cincinnati the publication of an anti-slavery paper was stopped by the simple process of throwing the printing-press into the Ohio River, and in Illinois an editor was murdered.
When a resolution was offered in the legislature of Illinois, attacking abolition and defending slavery, Lincoln and one other man voted against it. Lincoln offered a counter-resolution that the institution of slavery was not only founded on injustice but was bad policy. At that time he announced another of his political principles:
The probability that we may fail in a worthy cause is not a sufficient justification for our refusing to support it.
In 1847 Lincoln was elected to Congress. His own estimate of himself and his life up to that time is contained in a few lines prepared for the Congressional Record, in contrast with the pages of biography so often inflicted on that publication. It ran as follows:
