it is still a great dy
for burning fire-crackers. That spirit which desired the peaceful
extinction of slavery has itself become extinct with the occasion
and the men of the Revolution. . . . So far as peaceful, voluntary
emancipation is concerned, the condition of the negro slave in
America, scarcely less terrible to the contemplation of the free
mind, is now as fixed and hopeless of change for the better as that
of lost souls of the finally impenitent. The autocrat of all the
Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free
Republicans, sooner than will our masters voluntarily give up their
slaves.

"Our political problem now is, 'Can we as a nation continue together
_permanently_--forever--half slave, and half free'? The problem
is too mighty for me. May God in his mercy superintend the
solution."

(Under God, within ten years after this was written, Lincoln was
the instrument for the solution of the _mighty problem!_)

This was a fitting prelude to his speech on slavery at Springfield,
Illinois (June, 1858), wherein he said:

"In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been
reached and passed. '_A house divided against itself cannot
stand_.'

"I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave
and half free. I do not expect the house to fall--but I do expect
it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all
the other."(125)

Seward of New York compressed the issue between freedom and slavery
into a single sentence in his Rochester speech (October 25, 1858):

"It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring
forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner
or later, become either an entirely slave holding nation or entirely
a free labor nation."(126)

But statesmen were not the only persons who predicted the downfall
of slavery in the Republic; not the only persons who contributed
to that end, nor yet the only persons who foretold its overthrow
in blood.

The institution had grown to arrogant and intolerant as to brook
no opposition, and its friends did not even seek to clothe its
enormities.

A leading Southern journal, in 1854, honestly expressed the affection
in which slavery was held:

"We cherish slavery as the apple of our eye, and we are resolved
to maintain it, peaceably, if we can, forcibly, if we must."(127)

The clergy and religious people of the North came to believe slavery
must, in the mill