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444 Lincoln's early history. [1837-58 nine States were added to the Union. Illinois rose in population from 157,445 to 1,711,951, Chicago from a frontier trading-post to a commercial metropolis, Springfield from a settlement to a flourishing State capital. Roads, post routes, towns, commerce, courts, replaced the forest and prairie solitude. The dug-out canoe changed to the steam-boat, the buckskin garb of the hunter to the broadcloth of the doctor, the lawyer, and the clergyman. In this growth Abraham Lincoln took an active and essential part. He personally helped to build his country's cabins, survey its roads, defend its frontier, frame its laws, ad- minister its courts of justice, shape its national policy. In this practical school of applied politics he learned the fundamental principles of American statesmanship. In 1837 he left his first home at New Salem to form a law partnership at Springfield, the new capital of his State. In the political campaigns of 1840 and 1844 he was a Whig candidate for the office of presidential elector. In 1846 he was chosen to the Lower House of Congress, serving one term of two years. During the five years which followed he practised law with marked success, and only re-entered politics when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused the whole country to an intense heat of public discussion. In the exciting party strife over the new question, Lincoln's maturing intellect and growing oratorical power at once attracted marked attention, and gave him such prominence that in 1855 he was the candidate of his party before the Illinois legislature for the post of Senator; and, though defeated, he maintained a leadership that secured to him for the second time the unanimous nomination of his party for the same office, when the term of Stephen A. Douglas was about to expire. Lincoln's seven joint debates with that popular and skilful Democratic champion in the Illinois senatorial campaign of 1858, while they did not save him from a second defeat, extended his fame and gave him high reputation as a national statesman. Two speeches made by him in that memorable campaign had deep influence on public opinion and wrought far-reaching party consequences. The first was his address before the Republican State Convention, in which he uttered the bold prophecy that, "This government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.... Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, north as well as south." This proposition he demonstrated by a critical analysis of the course and consequences of the Kansas-Nebraska legislation and the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court. The second was his Freeport debate with Douglas, when he forced that adroit tactician to declare that a territorial legislature might by "unfriendly legislation " exclude slavery in defiance of the Supreme Court dictum. For this avowal Douglas was