words. But something deep and strange
had stirred in the mother heart within her.

She drew away from his arms and cried in anguish.

"It's wrong. It's wrong. It's all wrong--this feud of blood! And God
will yet save the world from it. I must believe that or I'd go mad!"

The two men looked at each other in wonder for a moment and then at the
mother's convulsed face. Into the older man's features slowly crept a
look of awe, as if he had heard that voice before somewhere in the still
hours of his soul.

Stuart bent and kissed her tenderly.

"There, dear, you're overwrought. Don't worry. Your work God has given
you in these cradles."

"Yes, that's why I feel this way," she whispered on his breast.

CHAPTER XXXVII

If reason had ruled, the Gulf States of the South would never have
ordered their representatives to leave Washington on the election of
Abraham Lincoln. The new administration could have done nothing with the
Congress chosen. The President had been elected on a fluke because
of the division of the opposition into three tickets. Lincoln was a
minority President and was powerless except in the use of the veto.

If the Gulf States had paused for a moment they could have seen that
such an administration, whatever its views about Slavery, would have
failed, and the next election would have been theirs. The moment they
withdrew their members of Congress, however, the new party had a
majority and could shape the nation's laws.

The crowd mind acts on blind impulse, never on reason.

In spite of the President's humane purpose to keep peace when he
delivered his first inaugural, he had scarcely taken his seat at the
head of his Cabinet when the mob mind swept him from his moorings and he
was caught in the torrent of the war mania.

The firing on Fort Sumter was not the first shot by the Secessionists.
They had fired on the _Star of the West_, a ship sent to the relief
of the Fort, weeks before. They had driven her back to sea. But the
President at that moment had sufficient power to withstand the cry for
blood. At the next shot he succumbed to the inevitable and called for
75,000 volunteers to invade the South. This act of war was a violation
of his powers under Constitutional law. Congress alone could declare
war. But Congress was not in session.

The mob had, in fact, declared war. The President and his Cabinet were
forced to bow to its will and risk their necks on the outcome of the
struggle.