and loyalty. But in the mean time let the
Proclamation go wherever the army goes, let it go wherever
the navy secures a foothold on the outer border of the rebel
territory, and let it summon to our aid the negroes who are
truer to the Union than their disloyal masters; and when
they have come to us and put their lives in our keeping, let
us protect and defend them with the whole power of the
nation. Is there anything unconstitutional in that? Thank
God, there is not. And he who is willing to give back to
slavery a single person who has heard the summons and come
within our lines to obtain his freedom, he who would give up
a single man, woman, or child, once thus actually freed, is
not worthy the name of American. He may call himself
Confederate, if he will.

"Let it be remembered, also that the Proclamation has had a
very important bearing upon our foreign relations. It
evoked in behalf of our country that sympathy on the part of
the people in Europe, whose is the only sympathy we can ever
expect in our struggle to perpetuate free institutions.
Possessing that sympathy, moreover, we have had an element
in our favor which has kept the rulers of Europe in
wholesome dread of interference. The Proclamation relieved
us from the false position before attributed to us of
fighting simply for national power. It placed us right in
the eyes of the world, and transferred men's sympathies from
a confederacy fighting for independence as a means of
establishing slavery, to a nation whose institutions mean
constitutional liberty, and, when fairly wrought out, must
end in universal freedom."

The change of policy and of public opinion was so strongly endorsed that
it affected the rebels, who shortly passed a Congressional measure for
arming 200,000 negroes themselves. What a reversal of things; what a
change of sentiment, in less than twenty-four months![14] Mr. Lincoln,
in justifying the change, is reported to have said to Judge Mills, of
Wisconsin:

"The slightest knowledge of arithmetic will prove to any man
that the rebel armies cannot be destroyed with Democratic
strategy. It would sacrifice all the white men of the North
to do it. There are now in the service of the United States
near two hundred thousand able-bodied colored men, most of
them under arms, def