saw it was likely to re-appear so long as human nature remained the same, Thucydides had a presage that his history of the civil war between Athens and Sparta would be "a possession forever." "War,” he wrote, "is a violent master, and assimilates the tempers of most men to the condition in which it places them." So Cromwell, in the hour of his political agony, exclaimed against "the pitiful, beastly notion" that a government was to be "clamored at and blattered at," because it went beyond law in time of storm and stress.

And there is something worse than a breach of the Constitution. It is worse to lose the country for which the Constitution was made; but, if the defense of the proclamation can be rested on this ground, the fact does not require us to teach for doctrine of law that which is outside of law and against law. Mr. Jefferson held the Louisiana purchase to be extraconstitutional, but he did not try to bring it inside of the Constitution by construction. That he left to

others. It seems a waste of logic to argue the validity of Mr. Lincoln's edict. It moved above law, in the plane of statecraft. Not that its author, in so proceeding, moved on the moral plane of the insurgents. He wrought to save, they to destroy, the Union. Not that he acted in malice, for, as he protested, the case "was too vast for malicious dealing." And not that he clearly foresaw the end of

his step from its beginning. The fateful times in which he acted the foremost part were larger than any of the men who lived in them, tall and commanding as is the figure of the benign war President, and the events then moving over the dial of history were grander than the statesmen or soldiers who touched the springs that made them move. It was a day of elemental stir, and the ground is still quaking beneath our feet, under the throes and convulsions of that great social and political change which was first definitely foreshadowed to the world by the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln.

JAMES C. WELLING.

M

XXXI.

JOHN CONNESS.

UCH has been written concerning the rela

tions of Abraham Lincoln and Salmon P. Chase, but the history of their separation in 1864 and the acceptance of the resignation of Mr. Chase as Secretary of the Treasury, as given by the President in a semi-official manner at that time, has not been presented to the public.

The prosecution of the war had not up to that time been very successful, and the public credit was at its lowest ebb. Gold was at 2.80, and the people were rather discouraged. The first term of Mr. Lincoln was drawing to a close, and by common consent the President was a candidate for re-election. As stated by himself in his own way, "it was not well to swap horses in the middle of a stream."

He was willing to be a candidate because he could best represent the issue with the Democratic Party, who were declaring the war a failure, and preparing to put a candidate in the field upon that declaration.

Thus, as in the instance of his first nomination,

without personal ambition, he was willing to be an instrument in the hands of the people to test the

great issue before them.

He had declared the pur

administration to be the The Democratic Party

pose of the war by the preservation of the Union. claimed that the war for this purpose was a failure, and that the Union could only be preserved by peace and negotiation. This was the issue then clearly made up between the Democratic and Republican parties.

Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, was also a candidate for the Presidency. That he was an able, upright and patriotic man need not be stated. He represented such of the Republican Party as believed that the war had not been waged with the vigor and power necessary to conquer a peace; and also by those who wished it carried on more with reference to the expurgation of slavery than Mr. Lincoln had done.

The President held that it was his duty to preserve the Union, with or without slavery, while Mr. Chase believed, as an old antislavery man, that the destruction of slavery was the chief means in the prosecution of the war for the preservation of the Union.

The candidature of both was calculated to lead to infelicitous relations between the two, and it did.

This was doubtless by reason of intemperate sup