n chosen by a people to govern it should
throw their responsibility back at the heads of the electors. It is well
to be clear as to the kind of proceeding which the authors of this
proposal were really advocating: a statesman has come before the ordinary
citizen with a definite statement of the principle on which he would act,
and an ordinary citizen has thereupon taken his part in entrusting him
with power; then comes the moment for the statesman to carry out his
principle, and the latent opposition becomes of necessity more alarming;
the statesman is therefore to say to the ordinary citizen, "This is a
more difficult matter than I thought; and if I am to act as I said I
would, take on yourself the responsibility which I recently put myself
forward to bear." The ordinary citizen will naturally as a rule decline
a responsibility thus offered him, but he will not be grateful for the
offer or glad to be a forced accomplice in this process of indecision.

If we could determine the prevailing sentiment in the North at some
particular moment during the crisis, it would probably represent what
very few individual men continued to think for six months together.
Early in the crisis some strong opponents of slavery were for letting the
South go, declaring, as did Horace Greeley of the _New York Tribune_,
that "they would not be citizens of a Republic of which one part was
pinned to the other part with bayonets"; but this sentiment seems soon to
have given way when the same men began to consider, as Lincoln had
considered, whether an agreement to sever the Union between the States,
with the difficult adjustment of mutual interests which it would have
involved, could be so effected as to secure a lasting peace. A blind
rage on behalf of conciliation broke out later in prosperous business men
in great towns--even in Boston it is related that "Beacon Street
aristocrats" broke up a meeting to commemorate John Brown on the
anniversary of his death, and grave persons thought the meeting an
outrage. Waves of eager desire for compromise passed over the Northern
community. Observers at the time and historians after are easily
mistaken as to popular feeling; the acute fluctuations of opinion
inevitable among journalists, and in any sort of circle where men are
constantly meeting and talking politics, may leave the great mass of
quiet folk almost unaffected. We may be sure that there was a
considerable body of steady opinion very much