Mr. Lincoln has written to the editor of a Kentucky
paper a letter explaining in his usual lucidly colloquial style the policy he has felt himself compelled to pursue on the subject of slavery. "I am naturally anti-slavery," he says ; "if slavery is not wrong nothing is wrong. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially on this judgment and feeling." He had taken the oath of fidelity to the -constitution. "I could not take the o Tice without taking the oath, nor was it in my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power." He -did understand, however, that his oath to preserve the constitu- tion implied a deeper obligation to preserve the nation of which that constitution was the organic law. "Was it possible," he asks, "to lose the nation and yet preserve the constitution ?" " By general law, life and limb must be protected, yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life, but a life is never wisely given to save a limb." Hence he refused to sacrifice slavery till he felt that he had to choose between keeping slavery and losing the nation, constitution and all. In choosing to sac rifice slavery, "I hoped for greater gain than loss, but of this I was not entirely confident." Now after a year of trial he has gained 130,000 men by it, and what Unionist can regret such a gain ? He ends very characteristically, "I claim not to control events, but con-. fees plainly that events have controlled me." "If God wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North, as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will feel therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God.'' How any honest Northerners who read these noble words, and see how modestly yet firmly Mr. Lincoln has acted on the lessons which have opened his eyes to the great Divine purpose of this war, can medi- tate the substitution of any untried man for the next President we find it hard indeed to conceive.
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