If for such a truth you can find a compact illustration,
you can leave it much more firmly fixed in your readers' minds
than by any amount of systematic exposition. Lincoln in his
Springfield speech, for example, threw into striking form the
feeling which was so common in the North, that each step
forward in the advance of slavery so fitted into all earlier ones
that something like a concerted plan must be assumed:
We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are, the
result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different
portions of which we know have been gotten cut at different times and
places and by different workmen,--Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James,
for instance,--and we see these timbers joined together, and see they
exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises
exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different
pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too
many or too few, not omitting even scaffolding,--or, if a single piece
be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared
yet to bring such piece in,--in such a case we find it impossible not to
believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one
another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft
drawn up before the first blow was struck.
Pages:
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297