to Port Royal, from
Belle Plain, Virginia, to Brownsville, Texas, with homes and lodges.

The country had for its allies the river Mississippi, which would not
be divided, and the range of mountains which carried the stronghold of
the free through Western Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee to the
highlands of Alabama. But it invoked the still higher power of
immortal justice. In ancient Greece, where servitude was the universal
custom, it was held that if a child were to strike its parent, the
slave should defend the parent, and by that act recover his freedom.
After vain resistance, LINCOLN, who had tried to solve the question by
gradual emancipation, by colonization, and by compensation, at last
saw that slavery must be abolished, or the republic must die; and on
the first day of January, 1863, he wrote liberty on the banners of the
armies. When this proclamation, which struck the fetters from three
millions of slaves, reached Europe, Lord Russell, a countryman of
Milton and Wilberforce, eagerly put himself forward to speak of it in
the name of mankind, saying: "It is of a very strange nature"; "a
measure of war of a very questionable kind"; an act "of vengeance on
the slave owner," that does no more than "profess to emancipate slaves
where the United States authorities cannot make emancipation a
reality." Now there was no part of the country embraced in the
proclamation where the United States could not and did not make
emancipation a reality. Those who saw LINCOLN most frequently had
never before heard him speak with bitterness of any human being, but
he did not conceal how keenly he felt that he had been wronged by Lord
Russell. And he wrote, in reply to other cavils: "The emancipation
policy and the use of colored troops were the greatest blows yet dealt
to the rebellion; the job was a great national one, and let none be
slighted who bore an honorable part in it. I hope peace will come
soon, and come to stay; then will there be some black men who can
remember that they have helped mankind to this great consummation."

The proclamation accomplished its end, for, during the war, our armies
came into military possession of every State in rebellion. Then, too,
was called forth the new power that comes from the simultaneous
diffusion of thought and feeling among the nations of mankind. The
mysterious sympathy of the millions throughout the world was given
spontaneously. The best writers of Europe waked the conscience