issue, nor
was it an isolated issue. What really was in issue was the continuance
of the nation "dedicated," as he said on a great occasion, "to the
proposition that all men are equal," a nation founded by the Union of
self-governing communities, some of which lagged far behind the others
in applying in their own midst the elementary principles of freedom,
but yet a nation actuated from its very foundation in some important
respects by the acknowledgment of human rights.

The practical policy, then, on which his whole efforts were
concentrated consisted in this single point--the express recognition of
the essential evil of slavery by the enactment that it should not
spread further in the Territories subject to the Union. If slavery
were thus shut up within a ring fence and marked as a wrong thing which
the Union as a whole might tolerate but would not be a party to,
emancipation in the slave States would follow in course of time. It
would come about, Lincoln certainly thought, in a way far better for
the slaves as well as for their masters, than any forced liberation.
He was content to wait for it. "I do not mean that when it takes a
turn towards ultimate extinction, it will be in a day, nor in a year,
nor in two years. I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way
ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at least,
but that it will occur in the best way for both races in God's own good
time I have no doubt." If we wonder whether this policy, if soon
enough adopted by the Union as a whole, would really have brought on
emancipation in the South, the best answer is that, when the policy did
receive national sanction by the election of Lincoln, the principal
slave States themselves instinctively recognised it as fatal to slavery.

For the extinction of slavery he would wait; for a decision on the
principle of slavery he would not. It was idle to protest against
agitation of the question. If politicians would be silent that would
not get rid of "this same mighty deep-seated power that somehow
operates on the minds of men, exciting them and stirring them up in
every avenue of society--in politics, in religion, in literature, in
morals, in all the manifold relations of life." The stand, temperate
as it was, that he advocated against slavery should be taken at once
and finally. The difference, of which people grown accustomed to
slavery among their neighbours thought little, between letting it be