y
taken place; the audiences Lincoln addressed were fully conscious that
very many thousands had found in the United States a scope to lead
their own lives which the traditions and institutions no less than the
physical conditions of their former countries had denied them. There
was no need for him to enlarge on this fact; but there are repeated
indications of the distaste and alarm with which he witnessed a demand
that newcomers from Europe, or some classes of them, should be accorded
lesser privileges than they had enjoyed.

But notions of freedom and equality as applied to the negroes presented
a real difficulty. "There is," said Lincoln, "a natural disgust in the
minds of nearly all white people at the idea of an indiscriminate
amalgamation of the white and black men." (We might perhaps add that
as the inferior race becomes educated and rises in status it is likely
itself to share the same disgust.) Lincoln himself disliked the
thought of intermarriage between the races. He by no means took it for
granted that equality in political power must necessarily and properly
follow upon emancipation. Schemes for colonial settlement of the
negroes in Africa, or for gradual emancipation accompanied by
educational measures, appealed to his sympathy. It was not given him
to take a part in the settlement after the war, and it is impossible to
guess what he would have achieved as a constructive statesman; but it
is certain that he would have proceeded with caution and with the
patience of sure faith; and he had that human sympathy with the white
people of the South, and no less with the slaves themselves, which
taught him the difficulty of the problem. But difficult as the problem
was, one solution was certainly wrong, and that was the permanent
acquiescence in slavery. If we may judge from reiteration in his
speeches, no sophism angered him quite so much as the very popular
sophism which defended slavery by presenting a literal equality as the
real alternative to it. "I protest against the counterfeit logic which
says that since I do not want a negro woman for my slave I must
necessarily want her for my wife. I may want her for neither. I may
simply let her alone. In some respects she is certainly not my equal.
But in her natural right to eat the bread which she has earned by the
sweat of her brow, she is my equal and the equal of any man."

The men who had made the Union had, as Lincoln contended, and in regard
t