Abstract
Lincoln’s 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” was not his first political speech, but it was the first articulation of many themes that would become prominent in his more mature oratory. Among these was the claim that stable political institutions require the cultivation of habits of thought and behavior that fit people for democratic living. Further, these habits, though arising from the demands of reason, must ingrain themselves beneath reason into the structure of popular feeling so as to become an intuitive, and never fully reflected on, ground of habit—