y to
beat him, were unchanged. What availed a symbol more or less on the
imperial banner? Even admit that it indicated the emperor's personal
rejection of the old and adoption of the newer faith, what of that?
Would not everybody else abide by the religion of his own choice,
whatever that might be? Away, then, with all theological babble, which
plain people can never half understand! Rome and the emperor for ever!
Yet in that despised symbol, announcing that the Empire had become the
protector instead of the persecutor of the Christian faith, was the germ
of a greater transformation than was wrought by the Deluge.

The Proclamation of Freedom by President Lincoln is doubtless open to
criticism. Why did he not declare all slaves emancipated? Why not make
such legal manumission operative at once? Why intimate that certain
States should (or might) be excepted from its operation? Why not declare
the slaves liberated because of the essential, inevitable wrong of
holding them in bondage? Why not appeal to God for His blessing on the
cause henceforward inseparably identified with that of Right and
Liberty? Such questions may be multiplied indefinitely; but to what end?
What matters that the Proclamation might or should be different, since
we have practical concern only with the Proclamation as it is?

For more than a lifetime, slavery has been accepted and regarded as a
national institution. The American in Europe was "perplexed in the
extreme" by the questionings and criticisms of humane, intelligent
observers, who could not comprehend how a country should contain Four
Millions of slaves by the official census, yet not be a slaveholding
country. With our capital a slaveholding city; with our fortresses in
good part constructed by the labor of slaves; with our flag the chief
shelter of the African Slave Trade, and our statute book disgraced by
the most arbitrary and inhuman Fugitive Slave Law ever devised, it _was_
a nice operation to prove this no slaveholding country, but only one
wherein certain citizens, by virtue of local laws, over which we had no
control, were permitted to hold Blacks in slavery. And, when it is
notorious that the active partisans of slavery filled every Federal
office, even in the nominally free States, and excluded rigorously from
office every opponent of the baleful system, it is certain that the
shrug of the polite Frenchman who listened to our demonstration that
ours, after all, was not a slavehol