to favor compensated emancipation, I believed the indispensable necessity for military emancipation and arming the blacks would come unless averted by that measure. They declined the proposition, and I was, in my best judgment, driven to the alternative of either surrendering the Union, and with it the Constitution, or of laying strong hand upon the colored element. I chose the latter. In choosing it, I hoped for greater gain than loss; but of this I was not entirely confident. More than a year of trial now shows no loss by it in our foreign relations, none in our home popular sentiment, none in our white military force-no loss by it anyhow or anywhere. the contrary, it shows a gain of quite a hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, seamen, and laborers. These are palpable facts, about which, as facts, there can be no caviling. We have the men; and we could not have had them without the measure.

On

"And now let any Union man who complains of the measure test himself by writing down in one line that he is for subduing the rebellion by force of arms; and in the next, that he is for taking these one hundred and thirty thousand men from the Union side, and placing them where they would be but for the measure he condemns. If he cannot face his cause so stated, it is only because he cannot face the truth.'

I add a word which was not in the verbal conversation. In telling this tale I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled

events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years' struggle, the Nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North, as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.

Yours truly,

A. LINCOLN.

AN ENGLISH ESTIMATE OF LINCOLN.

It is one of the greatest of Lincoln's claims to admiration that, though he sympathized with the fervor and enthusiasm of his countrymen, he was not carried away by it. He was one of those rare men who can at once be zealous and moderate, who are kindled by great ideas, and who yet retain complete control of the critical faculty. And more than this, Lincoln was a man who could be reserved without the chill of reserve. Again, he could make allowance for demerits in a principle or a human instrument without ever falling into the purblindness of cynicism. He often acted in his dealings with men much as a professed cynic might have acted; but his conduct was due, not to any disbelief in virtue, but to a wide toler

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ance and a clear knowledge of human nature. saw things as a disillusionized man sees them, and yet in the bad sense he never suffered any disillusionment. For suffusing and combining his other qualities was a serenity of mind which affected the whole man. He viewed the world too much as a whole to be greatly troubled or perplexed over its accidents. To this serenity of mind was due an almost total absence of indignation in the ordinary sense. Generals might half-ruin the cause for the sake of some trumpery quarrel, or in order to gain some petty personal advantage; office-seekers might worry at the very crisis of the nation's fate; but none of the pettinesses, the spites, or the follies could rouse in Lincoln the impatience or the indignation that would have been wakened in ordinary men. Pity, and nothing else,

the feeling such exhibitions occasioned him. Lincoln seems to have felt the excuse that tempers the guilt of every mortal transgression. His largeness and tenderness of nature made him at heart a universal apologist. He was, of course, too practical and too great a statesman to let this sensibility to the excuses that can be made for human conduct induce him to allow misdeeds to go unpunished or uncorrected. He acted as firmly and as severely as if he had experienced the most burning indignation; but the moment we come to Lincoln's real feelings, we see that he was never incensed, and that, even in its most legitimate form, the desire for retribution is absent

from his mind. "To know all is to forgive all," was the secret of his attitude towards human affairs. That is not the highest wisdom; but it errs on the right, and also on the rare, side.

So much for the intellectual side of Lincoln's nature. Behind it was a personality of singular charm. Tenderness and humor were its main characteristics. As he rode through a forest in springtime, he would keep on dismounting to put back the young birds that had fallen from their nests. There was not a situation in life which could not afford him the subject for a kindly smile. It needed a character so full of gentleness and good temper to sustain the intolerable weight of responsibility which the war threw upon the shoulders of the President. Most men would have been crushed by the burden. His serenity of temper saved Lincoln. Except when the miserable necessity of having to sign the order for a military execution took away his sleep, he carried on his work without any visible sign of over-strain. Not the least of Lincoln's achievements is to be found in the fact that though for four years he wielded a power and a personal authority greater than that exercised by any monarch on earth, he never gave satirist or caricaturist the slightest real ground for declaring that his sudden rise to world-wide fame had turned the head of the backwoodsman. Under the circumstances there would have been every excuse for Lincoln had he assumed to his subordinates some

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what of the bearing of the autocrat he was. sign of the absolute sincerity and good sense of the President that he was under no sort of a temptation to do so. Lincoln was before all things a gentleman, and the good taste inseparable from that character made it impossible for him to be spoiled by power and position. This grace and strength of character is never better shown than in the letters to his generals, victorious or defeated. When they were beaten, he was anxious to share the blame; when victorious he was instant to deny by anticipation any rumor that he had inspired the strategy of the campaign. If a general had to be reprimanded he did it as only the most perfect of gentlemen could do it. He could convey the severest censure without inflicting any wound that would not heal, and this not by using roundabout expressions, but in the plainest language. "He writes me like a father," were the heart-felt words of a commander who had been reproved by the President. Throughout these communications, the manner in which he not only conceals but altogether sinks all sense that the men to whom they are addressed were, in effect, his subordinates, is worthy of special note. "A breath could make them, as a breath had made," and yet Lincoln writes as if his generals were absolutely independent.

We have said something of Lincoln as a man and as the leader of a great cause. We desire now to dwell upon a point which is often neglected in con