"Now, the reason why I think so much of the President's Message is, because I read in it fitness to govern. I do not think he has entered Canaan, but he has set his face Zion-ward. I love the Constitution; though I have cursed it a hundred times, and I shall curse it again if it does not mean justice. I have laboured nineteen years to take nineteen States out of this Union; and if I have spent any nineteen years to the satisfaction of my Puritan conscience, it was those nineteen years. The child of six generations of Puritans, I was taught at a mother's knee to love purity before peace. And when Daniel Webster taught me that the Union meant making white men hypocrites and black men slaves— that it meant Lynch law in the Carolinas, and mob law in Massachusetts-that it meant lies in the pulpit, and gags in the Senate—when I was told that the cementing of the Union was returning slaves to their masters,-in the name of the God I love, and had been taught to honour, I cursed the Constitution and the Union, and endeavoured to break it, and, thank God! it is broken now. But when last summer I saw, or fancied I saw, that this Union could not exist unless it meant justice; when I fancied I saw nineteen millions of people already drifting with a current as inevitable as that of Niagara, and when, to-day, I hear the voice of the President, as I believe, uttering the same sentiment, I cannot but accept the whole thirty-four States. I am a Yankee born, and will buy Union at any time at a fair price,

"The first line of the President's Message recognises this crisis. It says in effect-Gentlemen of the Border States, release your slaves, we will pay you for them.' The Constitution in peace gives him no warrant; the Constitution in war gives him an absolute warrant, even to pour out the treasury of the United States at the feet of Kentucky. He recognises the Constitution; he recognises the fact that in war-time the Constitution is the root of the power of the Government, but that its branches spread beyond all constitutional limits. When the emergency of the State requires it, he can do anything. He can interfere with slavery to any extent; he can trample it under his feet, or he can buy it out.

"The President, in his Message, has opened the door of emancipation a foot, and, if he holds out and continues in the right, I shall be able to drive right through with a coach and six, with William Lloyd Garrison as a driver; that is, the President recognises what I believe to be the constitutional right of the Government, to do anything to save the State. He recognises the right to throw the cargo overboard to save the ship. In other words, it was heretofore believed that he hadn't emigrated from Kentucky-that he hadn't got his eyes opened yet any wider than would enable him to see the limits of the State of Kentucky alone.* That Message proves that he takes in the whole Union; that he sees the necessity

* Lincoln, though a naturalized citizen of Illinois, was born and bred in Kentucky, and married to a Kentucky lady.

of the hour. He says, virtually, 'Gentlemen, it may be possible that we cannot conquer with the cannoir; we shall have to conquer with emancipation; and I, Abraham Lincoln, announce that if that exigency comes upon me, I am ready to adopt it.' He treads as far on the thin ice as he dares do; let us assure him that the ice is strong, and bid him go a-head. I value this Message, not because Mr. Lincoln speaks, for he can neither preserve slavery nor kill it. It does not lie in the power of any single individual to do either. It lies in the Government-in the public. What I desire is to impress you with a deep conviction of the responsibility which rests upon you as a part of the nineteen millions. You cannot expect the President to do this work alone. We are his right hand and his left. How much will you do? He has come out from the Cabinet, and held out his hand. To how much will the people respond? I, for one, say, 'Go on, old man, I am with you.'

"I think that we are too much accustomed to make light of the crisis. We think the South is broken and battered out: she doesn't draw much water. Donelson and Henry have been surrendered, and our troops are moving backward. We begin to regard them as powerless and foolish. Yes; for I used to read in the Herald and Tribune, in regard to the Merrimac, that she was so severely battered out and loaded down with iron, that she couldn't float. Southern folly had made the same mistake in science-so our

newspapers asserted that she had in statesmanship. They tried to establish a Confederacy, but it wouldn't float, and now they had a vessel that was in the same condition. But one day she steamed down to Fortress Monroe, and frigates lay in wrecks on either side: what stayed her destructive progress? Being, so to speak, a soldier down in the trenches, I know but little of the doings of the Cabinet, but I think if we had depended solely upon the defence that was provided from the White House or the Admiralty, we should have been but badly off. But the people sent down the little Monitor. They got her up, and paid for her themselves to spite the Administration, and flung her right into the face of the navy. She went down and came out victorious. This is a significant fact, a representative fact. It is the people coming up with their impulsive, instinctive, and ready common-sense, making up for a deficiency of the Government; and, I believe, the anti-slavery sentiment of to-day is like the roundhouse of the Monitor, it spreads itself on all sides, and nothing can get out of reach: that is the meaning of the President's Message.

"So, to-day, as an Abolitionist, with this evidence of the willingness of the Government-with this re'sponse of the more than willingness of the people— with this rebuke of Cotton is king-with this education of the North to the crisis, I believe that the back of slavery is broken. Whether you think that the stars

and stripes mean liberty or not, the slaves know that such is their meaning. The slave will recognise in that old flag the emblem of freedom, and, flocking to its standard, will refuse to be driven from beneath its folds. As an Abolitionist, therefore, I have no considerable interest in this war. The only interest I have is as a citizen; is as a man with some feeling of responsibility for the institutions of the nineteen States. It is as such that I survey the operations of Government, and count and scrutinize them in regard to their influence on the issues of this war. I think there are two paths leading out of it one is the path of peace, radical, profitable, solid, and permanent; the other is the path of peace obtained through compromise, second-rate power, and, in the end, disaster.

"The action of the Government which to me is the most promising for the future of this Union is the restoration to command of John C. Fremont. The Herald, supported by the bankerdom of the North, indicted him for inefficiency and lack of integrity. The Grand Jury met at the White House, and wrote ignoramus on the indictment.* That I read, I think, in the act of the President in sending him to the mountains. If John Brown cannot have the mountain, I know of no one to whom its care would be better entrusted than John Fremont. My first choice would have been

* This was just after the appointment of Fremont to the command of the army in the mountain district of Western Virginia.