It may be assumed as an axiom that Providence has never gifted any political party with all of political wisdom or blinded it with all of political folly.  Upon the foregoing point of controversy the Whigs were sadly thrown on the defensive, and labored heavily under their already discounted declamation.  But instinct rather than sagacity led them to turn their eyes to the future, and successfully upon other points to retrieve their mistake.  Within six weeks after Lincoln’s speech President Polk sent to the Senate a treaty of peace, under which Mexico ceded to the United States an extent of territory equal in area to Germany, France, and Spain combined, and thereafter the origin of the war was an obsolete question.  What should be done with the new territory was now the issue.

This issue embraced the already exciting slavery question, and Mr. Lincoln was doubtless gratified that the Whigs had taken a position upon it so consonant with his own convictions.  Already, in the previous Congress, the body of the Whig members had joined a small group of antislavery Democrats in fastening upon an appropriation bill the famous “Wilmot Proviso,” that slavery should never exist in territory acquired from Mexico, and the Whigs of the Thirtieth Congress steadily followed the policy of voting for the same restriction in regard to every piece of legislation where it was applicable.  Mr. Lincoln often said he had voted forty or fifty times for the Wilmot Proviso in various forms during his single term.

Upon another point he and the other Whigs were equally wise.  Repelling the Democratic charge that they were unpatriotic in denouncing the war, they voted in favor of every measure to sustain, supply, and encourage the soldiers in the field.  But their most adroit piece of strategy, now that the war was ended, was in their movement to make General Taylor President.

In this movement Mr. Lincoln took a leading and active part.  No living American statesman has ever been idolized by his party adherents as was Henry Clay for a whole generation, and Mr. Lincoln fully shared this hero-worship.  But his practical campaigning as a candidate for presidential elector in the Harrison campaign of 1840, and the Clay campaign of 1844, in Illinois and the adjoining States, afforded him a basis for sound judgment, and convinced him that the day when Clay could have been elected President was forever passed.

“Mr. Clay’s chance for an election is just no chance at all,” he wrote on April 30.  “He might get New York, and that would have elected in 1844, but it will not now, because he must now, at the least, lose Tennessee which he had then, and in addition the fifteen new votes of Florida, Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin....  In my judgment, we can elect nobody but General Taylor; and we cannot elect him without a nomination.  Therefore don’t fail to send a delegate.”  And again on the same day:  “Mr. Clay’s letter has not advanced his interests any here.  Several who