and Weed to underestimate the extent of the hurt they had done Greeley. They might have realized that the expartner was not inactive in the convention of 1856, which nominated Fremont and—although he was most anxious to be nominated, even against the advice of his friend Weed—passed Seward completely over. Weed believed that it was impossible to elect the Republican candidate in 1856, and for that reason did not support Seward, wishing to save him for 1860; by that time, he believed, the Republican party would be strong enough to elect its candidate. Greeley "sided "with Weed in this sage view of the situation. It was Borgian unanimity.
Two years later the debates in Illinois between Stephen A. Douglas,—whose theory of popular sovereignty had appealed not only to northern Democrats but to many northern Republicans,—and Abraham Lincoln, an unknown Republican "politician," brought to the front the man who was to solve the questions of this grave period. It was during these debates that Lincoln had declared that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." Several months later Seward, in his Rochester speech, summed up the impending clash as "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free labor nation." Both of these statements arrived at the same point at practically the same time and Seward, with his greater reputation, was given the credit of having antedated Lincoln.
Bennett, who had remained Democratic and around whom an agitation had developed without any apparent disturbance of his own self-satisfaction, denounced Sewward as a more dangerous person than Beecher or Garrison, declaring that no conflict existed, except the one
