stiny. Everything has been at work for the past ten years in the
cause of anti-slavery, but Garrison and Phillips have been far less
successful propagandists than the slaveholders themselves, with the
constantly growing arrogance of their pretensions and encroachments.
They have forced the question upon the attention of every voter in the
Free States, by defiantly putting freedom and democracy on the
defensive. But, even after the Kansas outrages, there was no
wide-spread desire on the part of the North to commit aggressions,
though there was a growing determination to resist them. The popular
unanimity in favor of the war three years ago was but in small measure
the result of anti-slavery sentiment, far less of any zeal for
abolition. But every month of the war, every movement of the allies of
slavery in the Free States, has been making Abolitionists by the
thousand. The masses of any people, however intelligent, are very
little moved by abstract principles of humanity and justice, until
those principles are interpreted for them by the stinging commentary of
some infringement upon their own rights, and then their instincts and
passions, once aroused, do indeed derive an incalculable reinforcement
of impulse and intensity from those higher ideas, those sublime
traditions, which have no motive political force till they are allied
with a sense of immediate personal wrong or imminent peril. Then at
last the stars in their courses begin to fight against Sisera. Had any
one doubted before that the rights of human nature are unitary, that
oppression is of one hue the world over, no matter what the color of
the oppressed,--had any one failed to see what the real essence of the
contest was,--the efforts of the advocates of slavery among ourselves
to throw discredit upon the fundamental axioms of the Declaration of
Independence and the radical doctrines of Christianity could not fail
to sharpen his eyes.

While every day was bringing the people nearer to the conclusion which
all thinking men saw to be inevitable from the beginning, it was wise
in Mr. Lincoln to leave the shaping of his policy to events. In this
country, where the rough and ready understanding of the people is sure
at last to be the controlling power, a profound common-sense is the
best genius for statesmanship. Hitherto, the wisdom of the President's
measures has been justified by the fact that they have always resulted
in more firmly uniting public opi