shows that you are
stronger, have more influence with the people of this country than I";
and he would have invited him to co-operate in saving the Union now, by
using that great influence to secure from the people the willing
enlistment of enough recruits. "And the general," said Seward, "would
have said, 'Yes, yes'; and again the next day, when you spoke to him
about it, 'Yes, yes'; and so on indefinitely, and he would have done
nothing."

"Seldom in history," wrote Emerson in a letter after the election, "was
so much staked upon a popular vote. I suppose never in history."

And to those Americans of all classes and in all districts of the North,
who had set their hearts and were giving all they had to give to preserve
the life of the nation, the political crisis of 1864 would seem to have
been the most anxious moment of the war. It is impossible--it must be
repeated--to guess how great the danger really was that their popular
government might in the result betray the true and underlying will of the
people; for in any country (and in America perhaps more than most) the
average of politicians, whose voices are most loudly heard, can only in a
rough and approximate fashion be representative. But there is in any
case no cause for surprise that the North should at one time have
trembled. Historic imagination is easily, though not one whit too
deeply, moved by the heroic stand of the South. It is only after the
effort to understand the light in which the task of the North has
presented itself to capable soldiers, that a civilian can perceive what
sustained resolution was required if, though far the stronger, it was to
make its strength tell. Notwithstanding the somewhat painful impression
which the political chronicle of this time at some points gives, it is
the fact that the wisest Englishmen who were in those days in America and
had means of observing what passed have retained a lasting sense of the
constancy, under trial, of the North.

CHAPTER XII

THE END

On December 6, 1864, Lincoln sent the last of his Annual Messages to
Congress. He treated as matter for oblivion the "impugning of motives
and heated controversy as to the proper means of advancing the Union
cause," which had played so large a part in the Presidential election
and the other elections of the autumn. For, as he said, "on the
distinct issue of Union or no Union the politicians have shown their
instinctive knowledge that there is no