. He is bound to put an end to
the connection. He is bound to act justly and humanely towards the
woman. But no sane moralist would maintain that he was bound to marry
the woman--that is, to treat the illicit relationship as if it were a
wholly different lawful relationship such as it was never intended to be
and never could have been.

Such was the plain sense and logic of the situation. To drive such sense
into Sumner's lofty but wooden head would have been an impossible
enterprise, but the mass of Northerners could almost certainly have been
persuaded to a rational policy if a sudden and tragic catastrophe had
not altered at a critical moment the whole complexion of public affairs.

Lincoln made his last public speech on April 11, 1865, mainly in defence
of his Reconstruction policy as exemplified in the test case of
Louisiana. On the following Good Friday he summoned his last Cabinet, at
which his ideas on the subject were still further developed. That
Cabinet meeting has an additional interest as presenting us with one of
the best authenticated of those curious happenings which we may
attribute to coincidence or to something deeper, according to our
predilections. It is authenticated by the amplest testimony that Lincoln
told his Cabinet that he expected that that day would bring some
important piece of public news--he thought it might be the surrender of
Johnstone and the last of the Confederate armies--and that he gave as a
reason the fact that he had had a certain dream, which had come to him
on the night before Gettysburg and on the eve of almost every other
decisive event in the history of the war. Certain it is that Johnstone
did not surrender that day, but before midnight an event of far graver
and more fatal purport had changed the destiny of the nation. Abraham
Lincoln was dead.

A conspiracy against his life and that of the Northern leaders had been
formed by a group of exasperated and fanatical Southerners who met at
the house of a Mrs. Suratt in the neighbourhood of Washington. One of
the conspirators was to kill Seward, who was confined to his bed by
illness, but on whom an unsuccessful attempt was made. Another, it is
believed, was instructed to remove Grant, but the general unexpectedly
left Washington, and no direct threat was offered to him. The task of
making away with the President was assigned to John Wilkes Booth, a
dissolute and crack-brained actor. Lincoln and his wife were present
that ni