ing the prosecution of the war at whatever cost, till union and freedom were won. Only Delaware, Kentucky, and New Jersey gave their electoral votes for McClellan. In a total of four million votes, Lincoln had a majority of 400,000. New York was for him by a narrow margin of 7000; Illinois by 30,000; Ohio by 60,000; and Massachusetts led the column with 127,000 for Lincoln to 40,000 for his opponent. The day after the election, November 9, the Republican said:

"The appeal to the avarice and cowardice of the people was a strong one, and it was vigorously plied by the opposition. The burdens of the war are fearful, and they are severely felt. The people would rejoice with joy unspeakable in the restoration of peace. But they have rejected all solicitations to a premature and dishonorable peace. They have declared that they prefer any sacrifice of ease, property, life, to the sacrifice of the Union and the surrender of the nation to the slave-holding oligarchy. The decision is honor and safety to the country and to all who have contributed to it.

"Let the victors be magnanimous. The great body of the Democratic party have meant well for their country in their votes against the Administration. Copperheads and sympathizers with treason are but a fraction of that party, and the party has lost by its concessions to their influence. The masses of the Democratic party will still stand by the country, fight its battles, and rejoice in its victories. Let their patriotism have generous recognition, and let them still further exhibit and attest it by ready acquiescence in the decision of the majority, and by cordial support of the Administration indorsed so strongly by the people."

The completion of emancipation, by extending it over the whole Union and making it irrevocable, had been inaugurated early in 1864, when the Senate passed the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. In the House it failed of the necessary two-thirds vote. The Republican National Convention insisted on "the utter and complete extirpation of slavery." The Republican

declared (November 10) that by the reëlection of Lincoln, and yet more explicitly by the congressional elections, which gave the party more than two-thirds of the House, the destruction of slavery was assured.

"The amendment will be adopted by the next Congress " [it was in fact adopted by the old Congress in its final session], "and the people will ratify it with eagerness and delight the moment they can get a chance. Thus will slavery be legally and constitutionally abolished throughout this Union. This result of Tuesday's effort is even more important in its ultimate consequences than the reëlection of Mr. Lincoln. It is the crowning glory of the peaceful victory of the day. It is a triumph for all time. It settles the vexed question which has brought war, bloodshed, and debt upon the nation, and precludes the possibility of another rebellion in behalf of slavery. The grand triumph is nearly completed. Let us thank God and push on."

The political questions of the time have offered the salient points for quotation and comment in this chapter. But the war itself is the great drama which is seen through the daily pages of the newspaper file from April, 1861, to April, 1865. There it all stands vividly out - the four years' experience which so deeply impressed the lives of all who shared it. There is the first eager and passionate rush against the foe; there are the first defeats, the disappointments, the perplexities, the evergrowing sacrifices; then the deep breath of anticipated triumph when one week saw Gettysburg won at the east and Vicksburg captured at the west; the brightening hope; then the industries of peace recovering and multiplying themselves in the midst of war; the dogged, desperate rally for the last tug of the Wilderness and Petersburg; the equal valor of North and South; the myriads of lives lost and homes desolated; the new manliness wrought by heroic endurance into North and South alike; the birth of a race into freedom, the restoration of a people to unity.

CHAPTER XXIX.

IN EUROPE.

To the "Republican.”

LONDON, April 28, 1862.

NLY five days have gone since we landed at Liverpool,

ON

yet they seem as many weeks. . . . It is curious to notice how many of these Englishmen I seem to know as old acquaintances. Punch and Thackeray and Dickens and the Illustrated News have made one-half of them as familiar to my eyes as my home neighbors. We had a faint Lord Dundreary on the ship coming out. The custom-house officers that boarded us in the stream were unmistakable as if they had borne printed labels. . . . The village butcher, the magistrate, the member of the town council, the hotel waiter, milord Tom Noddy's valet let loose for an afternoon, Betsey the cook, and Mary the chamber-girl, all pass before you in familiar guise. You almost unconsciously nod your head as they go by. As yet I get my waiters and ministers of the established church sadly mixed up. They dress just alike, and so far I have to give the preference for impressiveness of manner and mental alertness to the waiters. Certainly a big man in white canonicals, who mouthed a lot of incoherent stuff at a popular audience in Westminster Abbey last night, would do the world and his Maker better service in bringing bread and cheese and pouring beer in a country inn than in disgusting and befogging people from a pulpit in the matter of the highest import to their happiness. But a shoemaker I saw at Chester was the very St. Crispin

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himself, and it was by great effort of will that I kept myself from rushing into his arms as if he had been a "long-lost brother."

So, too, does Nature come to you here in half-friendly and familiar forms. She is new, yet old. She reproduces to your mind the descriptions of poets and moralists that you had read and forgotten long ago. You look and wonder where you ever saw the same before; confident you have, yet sure you never could, as stern and strange events call to mind a dream thereof not till then remembered. The wide, green fields, greener far than even New England meadows,bright with yellow cowslip and white daisy; the long hedgerows of hawthorn, sprinkled often with sweet-brier; the holly, the yew, the dark, mournful cypress and juniper, soberly swaying in grand masses as if keeping time to the slow, deep beatings of a widowed heart; the spreading bushes of the rhododendrons, filling the ground for rods and rising to ten or fifteen feet in height, bursting with the buds of the white, or putting out the green leaves with the wealth of scarlet bloom; the parks of oak; the little white cottages, covered with blossoming peas or flowering vines; the low, dark, stone parish church, moss-covered and ivy-crowned; the surrounding church-yard with the low-lying monuments of half a dozen generations, grass-grown and time-faded, but still hallowed by a posterity that lives in the same cottages that they lived in, and will lie where they lie; the long, narrow pathways through the fields; the stile where Mary's lover sat and sung for her,all "stand dressed in living green" before you, and call up memories and associations and persons that have lain buried and forgotten for half a life-time. You rub your eyes, and look for the people who ought to be among the familiar scenes,for Mrs. Poyser and her children coming home from church, for Maggie Tulliver running away to join the gypsies, for Adam Bede stalking sternly forth to his work or to search for his lost Hetty, for the lovers walking arm in arm through the fields, or sitting fondly under the hedge, regardless of all curious eyes, for the cruel gamekeeper in pursuit of the skulking poacher, for the humble but devoted country curate going

about doing good, "passing rich on forty pounds a year." They are all here, and I have seen some of them, and shall see the rest before I leave England.

To his Wife.

LONDON, April 29, 1862.

. I have on the whole enjoyed the stay here. But I am glad to go away- I should be sick of it in two days more. I have taken in a general sense of the city, and am indifferent about details. We shall probably spend four or five more days here in June, to see the great Exhibition, then complete and in order, the British Museum, Windsor Castle, and one or two other specialties; and yet but for the country of England I could hardly be tempted back. I cannot begin to tell you, Mary, how beautiful that is to me already, and how rich its promise is for June. You know how "Plainfield," and that part of West Springfield where the market gardens are, look in their best estate; and this gives you the best suggestion I can think of, of all England. It is literally a garden. The hedges, the evergreens, the ivy, the flowers, are rich with rural beauty; and then it is such a comfort to a tired American- tired of our fret and hurry and unfinish—to see something done and completed and polished.

As for my health- the first eight or ten days of the voyage pulled me down considerably, but ever since I have been improving, and now I am surely better than when I left home. I get thoroughly fatigued physically every day, without commonly too much nervous excitement or exhaustion, and this has a favorable effect upon my sleep. I think I get more of it, though still the great trouble is broken and dreaming nights. I am, on the whole, quite satisfied with the improvement I have made in the short time I have been away. At Paris we shall settle down into a more quiet and regular life than we have lived in England, and I expect to enjoy that city much more than London. But I look forward to our proposed week on the Isle of Wight, another week in the Lake country of northern England, and the month or six weeks in Switzerland, with the largest anticipations of pleasure and improvement. The great