f conciliatory treatment he was sure that the slavery question
admitted of none. With him there was to be no further compromise with the
evil, not an inch more of concessions would he grant it. Here he took his
stand, and from it nothing and no one were able to budge him. If disunion
and civil war were crouching in the rough way of the Nation's duty, the
Republic was not to turn aside into easier ways to avoid them. It should
on the contrary, regardless of consequences, seek to re-establish itself
in justice and liberty.

He recognized, however, amid the excitement of the times with all his
old-time clarity of vision the constitutional limitations of the Reform.
He did not propose at this stage of the struggle to touch slavery within
the states, because Congress had not the power. To the utmost verge of the
Constitution be pushed his uncompromising opposition to it. Here he drew
up his forces, ready to cross the Rubicon of the slave-power whenever
justificatory cause arose. Such he considered to be the uprising of the
South in rebellion. Rebellion with him cancelled the slave covenants of
the Constitution and discharged the North from their further observance.

He was at last untrammelled by constitutional conditions and limitations,
was free to carry the War into Africa. "Carthago est delenda" was
thenceforth ever on his lips. Mr. Lincoln and the Republican party started
out to save the Union with slavery. It is the rage now, I know, to extol
his marvellous sagacity and statesmanship. And I too will join in the
panegyric of his great qualities. But here he was not infallible. For when
he issued his Emancipation Proclamation, the South too was weighing the
military necessity of a similar measure. Justice was Sumner's solitary
expedient, right his unfailing sagacity. Of no other American statesman
can they be so unqualifiedly affirmed. They are indeed his peculiar
distinction and glory. Here he is the transcendent figure in our political
history. And yet, he was no fanatical visionary, Utopian dreamer, but a
practical moralist in the domain of politics. When president and party
turned a deaf ear to him and his simple straightforward remedy to try
their own, he did not break with them. On the contrary foot to foot and
shoulder to shoulder he kept step with both as far as they went. Where
they halted he would not stop. Stuck as the wheels of State were, during
those dreadful years in the mire and clay of political expedienc