ain from tendering to you the
consolation which may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died
to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your
bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and the
lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a
sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."

Hardly could your illustrious sovereign, from the depths of her queenly
and womanly heart, have spoken words more touching and tender to soothe
the stricken mothers of her own soldiers.

The Emancipation Proclamation, with which Mr. Lincoln delighted the
country and the world on the first of January, 1863, will doubtless
secure for him a foremost place in history among the philanthropists
and benefactors of the race, as it rescued, from hopeless and degrading
slavery, so many millions of his fellow-beings described in the law and
existing in fact as "chattels-personal, in the hands of their owners
and possessors, to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever."
Rarely does the happy fortune come to one man to render such a service
to his kind--to proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the
inhabitants thereof.

Ideas rule the world, and never was there a more signal instance of this
triumph of an idea than here. William Lloyd Garrison, who thirty years
before had begun his crusade for the abolition of slavery, and had lived
to see this glorious and unexpected consummation of the hopeless cause
to which he had devoted his life, well described the proclamation as
a "great historic event, sublime in its magnitude, momentous and
beneficent in its far-reaching consequences, and eminently just and
right alike to the oppressor and the oppressed."

Lincoln had always been heart and soul opposed to slavery. Tradition
says that on the trip on the flatboat to New Orleans he formed his
first and last opinion of slavery at the sight of negroes chained and
scourged, and that then and there the iron entered into his soul. No
boy could grow to manhood in those days as a poor white in Kentucky and
Indiana, in close contact with slavery or in its neighborhood, without a
growing consciousness of its blighting effects on free labor, as well as
of its frightful injustice and cruelty. In the Legislature of Illinois,
where the public sentiment was all for upholding the institution and
violently against every movement for its abolition or restriction, upon
the passage of reso