must cease saying a word about
slavery, and raise a great outcry about Union. It must declare war
against France and Spain, and combine and organize all the governments
of North and South America in a crusade to enforce the Monroe Doctrine.
This policy once adopted, it must be the business of some one
incessantly to pursue it. "It is not in my especial province," wrote Mr.
Seward; "but I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility." This
phrase, which is a key to the whole memorandum, enables the reader
easily to translate its meaning into something like the following:

After a month's trial, you, Mr. Lincoln, are a failure as President. The
country is in desperate straits, and must use a desperate remedy. That
remedy is to submerge the South Carolina insurrection in a continental
war. Some new man must take the executive helm, and wield the undivided
presidential authority. I should have been nominated at Chicago, and
elected in November, but am willing to take your place and perform your
duties.

Why William H. Seward, who is fairly entitled to rank as a great
statesman, should have written this memorandum and presented it to Mr.
Lincoln, has never been explained; nor is it capable of explanation. Its
suggestions were so visionary, its reasoning so fallacious, its
assumptions so unwarranted, its conclusions so malapropos, that it falls
below critical examination. Had Mr. Lincoln been an envious or a
resentful man, he could not have wished for a better occasion to put a
rival under his feet.

The President doubtless considered the incident one of phenomenal
strangeness, but it did not in the least disturb his unselfish judgment
or mental equipoise. There was in his answer no trace of excitement or
passion. He pointed out in a few sentences of simple, quiet explanation
that what the administration had done was exactly a foreign and domestic
policy which the Secretary of State himself had concurred in and helped
to frame. Only, that Mr. Seward proposed to go further and give up
Sumter. Upon the central suggestion that some one mind must direct, Mr.
Lincoln wrote with simple dignity:

"If this must be done, I must do it. When a general line of policy is
adopted, I apprehend there is no danger of its being changed without
good reason, or continuing to be a subject of unnecessary debate; still,
upon points arising in its progress I wish, and suppose I am entitled to
have, the advice of all the cabinet."

Mr. Linc