nd unlawful proceedings in defence of
freedom in Kansas. "The battle of freedom," he exclaims in a vehement
plea for what may be called moderate as against radical policy, "is to
be fought out on principle. Slavery is violation of eternal right. We
have temporised with it from the necessities of our condition; but as
sure as God reigns and school children read, that black foul lie can
never be consecrated into God's hallowed truth." In other words, the
sure way and the only way to combat slavery lay in the firm and the
scrupulous assertion of principles which would carry the reason and the
conscience of the people with them; the repeal of the prohibition of
slavery in the Territories was a defiance of such principles, but so
too in its way was the disregard by Abolitionists of the rights
covenanted to the slave States. This side of Lincoln's doctrine is apt
to jar upon us. We feel with a great American historian that the North
would have been depraved indeed if it had not bred Abolitionists, and
it requires an effort to sympathise with Lincoln's rigidly correct
feeling--sometimes harshly expressed and sometimes apparently cold. It
is not possible to us, as it was to him a little later, to look on John
Brown's adventure merely as a crime. Nor can we wonder that, when he
was President and Civil War was raging, many good men in the North
mistook him and thought him half-hearted, because he persisted in his
respect for the rights of the Slave States so long as there seemed to
be a chance of saving the Union in that way. It was his primary
business, he then said, to save the Union if he could; "if I could save
the Union by emancipating all the slaves I would do so; if I could save
it by emancipating none of them, I would do it; if I could save it by
emancipating some and not others, I would do that too." But, as in the
letter at the beginning of this chapter he called Speed to witness, his
forbearance with slavery cost him real pain, and we shall misread both
his policy as President and his character as a man if we fail to see
that in the bottom of his mind he felt this forbearance to be required
by the very same principles which roused him against the extension of
the evil. Years before, he had written to an Abolitionist
correspondent that respect for the rights of the slave States was due
not only to the Constitution but, "as it seems to me, in a sense to
freedom itself." Negro slavery was not the only important