t if slavery were once
finally disposed of, the only cause of difference being out of the way,
the 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 favor 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 bore the hardest,
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 personality, 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 the administration of government, or of 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 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 labor, anxiety, and distress, without
one hour of peaceful repose from first to last. But 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 and thought 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