greed to facilitate, if he
could, an appeal to the Supreme Court, but declined, on the ground of
urgent military necessity, to delay the drafts in the meantime.
Seymour's obstructive conduct, however, was not confined to the
intelligible ground of objection to the Act itself; it showed itself in
the perpetual assertion that the quotas were unfair. No complaint as to
this had been raised before the riots. It seems that a quite unintended
error may in fact at first have been made. Lincoln, however, immediately
reduced the quotas in question to the full extent which the alleged error
would have required. Fresh complaints from Seymour followed, and so on
to the end. Ultimately Seymour was invited to come to Washington and
have out the whole matter of his complaints in conference with Stanton.
Like a prudent man, he again refused to face personal conference. It
seems that Governor Seymour, who was a great person in his day, was very
decidedly, in the common acceptance of the term, a gentleman. This has
been counted unto him for righteousness. It should rather be treated as
an aggravation of his very unmeritable conduct.

Thus, since the Proclamation of Emancipation the North had again become
possessed of what is sometimes considered a necessity of good government,
an organised Opposition ready and anxious to take the place of the
existing Administration. It can well be understood that honourable men
entered into this combination, but it is difficult to conceive on what
common principle they could hold together which would not have been
disastrous in its working. The more extreme leaders, who were likely to
prove the driving force among them, were not unfitly satirised in a novel
of the time called the "Man Without a Country." Their chance of success
in fact depended upon the ill-fortune of their country in the war and on
the irritation against the Government, which could be aroused by that
cause alone and not by such abuses as they fairly criticised. In the
latter part of 1863 the war was going well. A great meeting of "Union
men" was summoned in August in Illinois. Lincoln was tempted to go and
speak to them, but he contented himself with a letter. Phrases in it
might suggest the stump orator, more than in fact his actual stump
speeches usually did. In it, however, he made plain in the simplest
language the total fallacy of such talk of peace as had lately become
common; the Confederacy meant the Confederate