equired conditions. To contrast the size of the oak with that
of the parent acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all costs from its
slender strong-box, may serve for a child's wonder; but the real
miracle lies in that divine league which bound all the forces of nature
to the service of the tiny germ in fulfilling its destiny. Everything
has been at work for the past ten years in the cause of anti-slavery,
but Garrison and Phillips have been far less successful propagandists
than the slaveholders themselves, with the constantly growing arrogance
of their pretensions and encroachments. They have forced the question
upon the attention of every voter in the Free States, by defiantly
putting freedom and democracy on the defensive. But, even after the
Kansas outrages, there was no wide-spread desire on the part of the
North to commit aggressions, though there was a growing determination
to resist them. The popular unanimity in favor of the war three years
ago was but in small measure the result of anti-slavery sentiment, far
less of any zeal for abolition. But every month of the war, every
movement of the allies of slavery in the Free States, has been making
Abolitionists by the thousand. The masses of any people, however
intelligent, are very little moved by abstract principles of humanity
and justice, until those principles are interpreted for them by the
stinging commentary of some infringement upon their own rights, and
then their instincts and passions, once aroused, do indeed derive an
incalculable reinforcement of impulse and intensity from those higher
ideas, those sublime traditions, which have no motive political force
till they are allied with a sense of immediate personal wrong or
imminent peril. Then at last the stars in their courses begin to fight
against Sisera. Had any one doubted before that the rights of human
nature are unitary, that oppression is of one hue the world over, no
matter what the color of the oppressed,--had any one failed to see what
the real essence of the contest was,--the efforts of the advocates of
slavery among ourselves to throw discredit upon the fundamental axioms
of the Declaration of Independence and the radical doctrines of
Christianity could not fail to sharpen his eyes.

While every day was bringing the people nearer to the conclusion which
all thinking men saw to be inevitable from the beginning, it was wise
in Mr. Lincoln to leave the shaping of his policy to events. In this
cou