ir advancement. Looking
back, with knowledge of what happened later, we cannot fail to be glad
that they were emancipated somehow, but we are forced to regret that
they could not have been emancipated by some more considerate process.
Lincoln, perhaps alone among the Americans who were in earnest in this
matter, looked at it very much in the light in which all men look at it
to-day.

In the early part of 1862 the United States Government concluded a
treaty with Great Britain for the more effectual suppression of the
African slave trade, and it happened about the same time that the first
white man ever executed as a pirate under the American law against the
slave trade was hanged in New York. In those months Lincoln was
privately trying to bring about the passing by the Legislature of
Delaware of an Act for emancipating, with fit provisions for their
welfare, the few slaves in that State, conditionally upon compensation
to be paid to the owners by the United States. He hoped that if this
example were set by Delaware, it would be followed in Maryland, and
would spread later. The Delaware House were favourable to the scheme,
but the Senate of the State rejected it. Lincoln now made a more
public appeal in favour of his policy. In March, 1862, he sent a
Message to Congress, which has already been quoted, and in which he
urged the two Houses to pass Resolutions pledging the United States to
give pecuniary help to any State which adopted gradual emancipation.
It must be obvious that if the slave States of the North could have
been led to adopt this policy it would have been a fitting preliminary
to any action which might be taken against slavery in the South; and
the policy might have been extended to those Southern States which were
first recovered for the Union. The point, however, upon which Lincoln
dwelt in his Message was that, if slavery were once given up by the
border States, the South would abandon all hope that they would ever
join the Confederacy. In private letters to an editor of a newspaper
and others he pressed the consideration that the cost of compensated
abolition was small in proportion to what might be gained by a quicker
ending of the war. During the discussion of his proposal in Congress
and again after the end of the Session he invited the Senators and
Representatives of the border States to private conference with him in
which he besought of them "a calm and enlarged consideration, ranging,
i