had come, he struck the fatal blow, and signed the Proclamation which has made his name immortal. By it, the President, as Commander-in-Chief in time of actual armed rebellion, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing the rebellion, proclaimed all persons held as slaves in the States and parts of States then in rebellion to be thenceforward free, and declared that the executive, with the Army and Navy, would recognise and maintain their freedom. In the other great steps of the Government, which led to the triumphant prosecution of the war, he necessarily shared the responsibility and the credit with the great statesmen who stayed up his hands in his Cabinet-with Seward, Chase, Stanton, and the rest,— and with his generals and admirals, his soldiers and sailors ;-but this great act was absolutely his own. Conception and execution were exclusively his. He laid it before his Cabinet as a measure on which his mind was made up and could not be changed, asking them only for suggestions as to details. to details. He chose the circumstances amid which the Emancipation should be proclaimed and the time when it should take effect.

It came not an hour too soon; but public opinion in the North would not have sustained it earlier. In the first eighteen months the ravages of the war had extended from the Atlantic to beyond the Mississippi. Many victories in the West had been balanced and paralysed by inaction and disasters in Virginia, only partially redeemed by the bloody and indecisive battle of Antietam; a reaction had set in from the general enthusiasm which had swept the Northern States after the assault upon Sumter. It could not truly be said that they had lost heart; but faction was raising its head. Heard through the land like the blast of a bugle, the Proclamation rallied the patriotism of the country to fresh sacrifices and renewed ardour. It was a step that could not be revoked. It relieved the conscience of the nation from an incubus that had oppressed it from its birth. The United States were rescued from the false predicament in which they had been from the beginning, and the great popular heart leaped with new enthusiasm for Liberty and Union, henceforth and for ever, one and inseparable.' It brought not only moral but also material support to the cause of the Government. Within two years 120,000 coloured troops were enlisted in the military service and following the national flag, supported by all the loyalty of the North, and led by its choicest spirits. One mother said, when her son was offered the command of the first coloured regiment, If he accepts it I shall be as proud as if I had heard that he was shot.' He was shot while heading a gallant charge by his regiment. The Confederates answered to a request of his friends for his body that they had buried him under a layer of his niggers'; but that mother has lived to enjoy thirty-six years of his glory, and Boston has erected its noblest monument to his memory.

The effect of the Proclamation upon the actual progress of the war was not immediate; but wherever the Federal armies advanced they carried freedom with them, and when the summer came round the new spirit and force which had animated the Government and the people were manifest. In the first week of July, the decisive battle of Gettysburg turned the tide of war, and the fall of Vicksburg made the great river free from its source to the Gulf.

On foreign nations the influence of the Proclamation and of these new victories was of great importance. In those days, when there was no cable, it was not easy for foreign observers to appreciate what was really going on. They could not see clearly the true state of affairs, as in the last year of the nineteenth century we have been able, by our new electric vision, to watch every event at the Antipodes and observe its effect. The rebel emissaries, sent over to solicit intervention, spared no pains to instil into the minds of public and private men, and into the press, their own views of the character of the contest. The prospects of the Confederacy were always better abroad than at home. The stock markets of the world gambled upon its chances, and its bonds at one time were in high favour.

Strange ideas were seriously held. It was believed that the North was fighting for empire, and the South for independence; that the Southern States, instead of being the grossest oligarchies, essentially despotisms, founded on the right of one man to appropriate the fruit of other men's toil and to exclude them from equal rights, were real republics, feebler than their Northern rivals, but representing the same idea of freedom, and that the mighty strength of the nation was being put forth to crush them; that Jefferson Davis and the Southern leaders had created a nation; that the Republican experiment had failed, and the Union had ceased to be. But the crowning argument to foreign minds was that it was an utter impossibility for the Government to win in the contest; that the success of the Southern States, as far as separation was concerned, was as certain as any contingent event could be; that the subjugation of the South by the North, even if it could be accomplished, would prove a calamity to the United States and the world, and especially calamitous to the negro race; and that such a victory would necessarily leave the people of the South for many generations cherishing deadly hostility against the Government and the North, and plotting always to recover their independence.

When Lincoln issued his Proclamation, he knew that all these ideas were founded in error; that the national resources were inexhaustible; that the Government could and would win; and that if slavery were once finally disposed of, the only cause of difference being out of the way, North and South would come together again, and by-and-by be as good friends as ever. In many quarters

abroad the Proclamation was welcomed with enthusiasm by the friends of America; but I think the demonstrations in its favour that brought more gladness to Lincoln's heart than any other were the meetings held in the manufacturing centres by the very operatives upon whom the war pressed most hardly, expressing the most enthusiastic sympathy with the Proclamation, while they bore with heroic fortitude the grievous privations which the war entailed upon them. Mr. Lincoln's expectation, when he announced to the world that all slaves in all States then in rebellion were set free, must have been that the avowed position of his Government, that the continuance of the war now meant the annihilation of slavery, would make intervention impossible for any foreign nation whose people were lovers of liberty; and so the result proved.

The growth and development of Lincoln's mental power and moral force, of his intense and magnetic individuality, after the vast responsibilities of government were thrown upon him at the age of fifty-two, furnish a rare and striking illustration of the marvellous capacity and adaptability of the human intellect-of the sound mind in the sound body. He came to the discharge of the great duties of the Presidency with absolutely no experience in government, or in the vastly varied and complicated questions of foreign and domestic policy which immediately arose, and continued to press upon him during the rest of his life; but he mastered each subject as it came, apparently with the facility of a trained and experienced ruler. As Clarendon said of Cromwell, his parts seemed to be raised by the demands of great station.' His life through it all was one of intense labour, anxiety, and distress, without one hour of peaceful repose from first to last. He rose to every occasion. He led public opinion, but did not march so far in advance of it as to fail of its effective support in every great emergency. He knew the heart of the people as no man not in constant and absolute sympathy with them could have known it, and so, holding their confidence, he triumphed through and with them. Not only was there this steady growth of intellect, but the infinite delicacy of his nature and its capacity for refinement developed also, as exhibited in the purity and perfection of his language and style of speech. The rough backwoodsman, who had never seen the inside of a university, became in the end, by self-training and the exercise of his own powers of mind, heart, and soul, a master of style; and some of his utterances will rank with the best, the most perfectly adapted to the occasion which produced them. His whole soul was in his two-minutes speech at Gettysburg, at the dedication of the Soldiers' Cemetery.

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation,

or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate-we cannot consecrate- we cannot hallow-this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

He lived to see his work endorsed by an overwhelming majority of his countrymen. In his second Inaugural Address, pronounced just forty days before his death, there is a single passage which well displays his indomitable will, and at the same time his deep religious feeling, his sublime charity towards the enemies of his country, and his broad and catholic humanity :

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which in the Providence of God must needs come, but which having continued through the appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills, that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsmen's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'

With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right-let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan-to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

His prayer was answered. The forty days of life that remained to him were crowded with great events. He lived to see his Proclamation of Emancipation embodied in an amendment of the Constitution, adopted by Congress, and submitted to the States for ratification. The mighty scourge of war did speedily pass away; for it was given him to witness the surrender of the Rebel army and the fall of the Rebel capital, and the starry flag waving in triumph over the national soil. When he died by the madman's hand in the supreme hour of victory, the vanquished lost their best friend, and the human race one of its noblest examples; and all the friends of freedom and justice, in whose cause he lived and died, joined hands as mourners at his grave.

BY MAARTEN MAARTENS

M

RS. RUSSELL was a very good woman, very philanthropic. She said she was connected with 'the' Russells; but that was not correct. However, she was connected with very good Russells (socially speaking)—a sort of second-best Russells-and her place in society was Mayfair.

Her husband belonged to that large class who earn comfortable incomes, and do comfortable work, in Government offices. His evenings, therefore, were his own-more his own than he desired them to be, for he would gladly have shared them all with Mrs. Russell.

Algernon is so exacting,' said the lady, with considerable truth. 'He would like me to stop at home every night of the year, and really, you know, there are duties one owes to society. Not to society as such-O no, I am not thinking of these-but to one's fellow men. One who is engaged in philanthropic work, as I am, must inevitably keep up a large circle of acquaintances. I must go to receptions and dinners and conversaziones, so as to meet the people I want for my work. Algernon refuses to understand how all these things are interlaced.'

'I am sure you are admirable,' said everybody.

'No, no I do not mean that. I-I do my best; but life is very difficult, especially philanthropy. Now, there are the children. Sometimes I fancy Algernon thinks I neglect them. He never says anything. Yet I have always been so especially careful not to neglect the children. I have gone through "Line upon Line" with them twice. And they both have classes of their own at my Sunday school. You cannot think how sweet it is to see dear little Marian -she is only seven-teaching other children the stories out of Genesis. And Justin !-he is such a delicate boy: I have always been especially anxious about his health.'

"Your children will rise up and call you blessed,' said a man in a white choker who had come to collect.

But that was prophecy. At the present moment Justin, a weakly boy of ten, over-indulged in every sickly fancy, did not bless, but abuse. He had acquired an ugly habit of calling his mother names, nor did the Scripture cards which she hung about his bedroom prove an efficacious remedy. So she pretended not to hear, and would smilingly remark to little Marian that Justin had got his bad headache again. Whereupon Justin would grow exceedingly violent, until sometimes, but rarely, his father would happen to look in and box his ears. Then Mrs. Russell would be greatly annoyed at her husband, and possibly would say so in the children's presence, explaining that love and philanthropy and prudence and gentleness