a retailer, I originate nothing," and while the sentence is his own, by right of setting and perfect assimilation to its proper style and thought, its prototype is to be found in a passage of Webster's famous reply to Hayne, in 1830, one of his chief favourites among American speeches, even in New Salem days. It is the declaration that the Constitution of the United

States was no mere compact between sovereign States, but "an instrument of government made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people." Herndon says that he had also been struck, in 1858, by a passage in one of Theodore Parker's addresses, and had under-lined the sentence, "Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, for all the people, by all the people."

Gettysburg and Vicksburg had marked the turning of the tide. The Proclamation had justified itself. By the beginning of December it was estimated that it had brought 100,000 negroes, formerly slaves, into the service of the United States, half of whom were in the ranks, and half doing work which must otherwise have been performed by white men. Grant, too, had emerged signally from obscurity; at the end of November he had driven the Confederates out of Tennessee, and was soon to be given supreme command. The autumn elections also had shown return of popular confidence in the Administration.

a

But the President's troubles were by no means at an end. There still remained fifteen months of arduous fighting, and all the uncertainties of a Presidential Contest. All through the past year, moreover, the situation in Missouri had been full

of difficulty; Conservatives and Radicals continually engaging in the most bitter recriminations, and urging their quarrel upon Lincoln's attention, till he almost lost patience with both parties. The Radicals, especially, were disposed to dictate to him, till he answered a little tartly, "It is my duty to hear all, but at last I must, within my sphere, judge what to do and what to forbear."

Trouble also was continually occurring between the civil and military authorities in all parts of the country, but most of all in the border States, and in such Southern States as were, like Louisiana, under process of reconstruction. This called for constant sympathy and insight, and unlimited tact and patience. Under the strain his nervous forces were becoming exhausted. Sometimes he was petulant and unjust to his petitioners, and to one of these he said, as a sort of excuse for himself, "I shall never be glad any more. The springs of life are wearing away, and I shall not last." The feeling that he would not long outlive the struggle grew upon him. He expressed it more than once to

his friends.

...

"How willingly," he would sometimes wearily exclaim, "would I exchange places to-day with the soldier who sleeps on the ground in the Army of the Potomac."

His most painful duty was always that of signing the death-warrants for deserters, and he exercised all the ingenuity of a pettifogging attorney to find justifications for delays, hoping that Time might save the offender.

Beyond all other troubles which weighed upon the President at this time—always excepting his anxiety

as to the destiny of his people—lay their sufferings, both North and South. He shared, by all his quick human sympathies, in the life of the private soldiers, and their families at home. He was a welcome and frequent visitor both in camp and hospital; and his time was always at the service of individual soldiers, their widows and wives.

He was deeply interested in the work of the various agencies established for the succour of the wounded of either party. He regarded all those who fought and suffered, whether Unionists or Confederates, as citizens of a common country. He continually sought escape from the partizanship into which he was necessarily forced by the struggle, finding relief and balance in the common issues of death and bereavement and their Divine consolations. He felt, as he wrote early in the year, that “Whatever shall tend to turn our thoughts from the unreasoning and uncharitable passions, prejudices, and jealousies incident to a great national trouble such as ours, and to fix them upon the vast and long-enduring consequences, for weal or for woe, which are to result from the struggle, and especially to strengthen our reliance on the Supreme Being for the final triumph of the right, cannot but be well for us all." Living in this spirit, he kept his poise and generosity of soul, at the very centre and heart of all the fierce passion and bitterness of those years of tremendous and absorbing strife.

Chapter XII

The Peace-maker

Was Lincoln an Opportunist ?-His Fatalism-Prospects of Re-nomination-Grant-The Autumn of '64-Re-election-Lincoln's View of its Meaning-His Increased Religious Feeling-The XIII. Amendment-Chief-Justice Chase-Peace Talk-Second Inaugural-The Peace maker-Good Friday, 1865.

EARLY in April 1864, Lincoln suggested his relation to emancipation, and indeed to the war as a whole, in these remarkable words: "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."

And on the next day he wrote, in answer to a young people's petition for the freeing of all slave-children, "While I have not the power to grant all they ask, I trust they will remember that God has, and that, as it best, He wills to do it."

These two passages indicate Lincoln's belief in the

divine ordering of events, and his consequent attitude. That attitude is so finely suggested by a sentence from Edward Carpenter's Towards Democracy that I cannot refrain from quoting it here: "Do not hurry : have faith. The sportsman does not say, 'I will start a hare at the corner of this field,' or 'I will shoot a turkey-buzzard at the foot of that tree;' but he stands indifferent and waits on emergency, and so makes himself master of it." As General Grant once put the matter in more colloquial language: "I shall be along myself, and will take advantage of anything that turns up."

Lincoln can hardly be said to have formulated and adhered to any great scheme of national policy, any great plan of campaign. He armed himself with his purpose, and waited on emergency. He was always along himself," and ready to take advantage of opportunities. In this respect he may, perhaps, be called an opportunist, though it would be absurd to describe him as a politician without principles." He had an established conviction as to the purpose of the American nation; and he was assured of its power to achieve that purpose; for it was not only a purpose, it was a destiny. He himself, as leader, for the time being, of the nation, could but keep that purpose always before him, while accepting the events of the time as indications of the way in which it was to be accomplished. He put all his manhood into his labour for its accomplishment, sure of eventual success; not beating himself to pieces against emergency, but making himself master of events by accepting them.

Enough has already been said in the preceding pages to give evidence of this, perhaps the most