should also have been the last, because leading to the defeat of the Rebels, and the return of peace.  The President nowhere says that he seeks the abolition of slavery.  The blow he has dealt is directed against slavery in the dominions of the Confederacy.  That Confederacy claims to be a nation, and some of our acts amount to a virtual recognition of the claim which it makes.  Now, if we were at war with an old nation of which slavery was one of the institutions, it could not be said that we had not the right to offer freedom to its slaves.  Objection might be made to the proclamation of an offer of the kind, but it would be based on expediency.  England would not accept a plan that was formed half a century ago for the partition of the United States, and which had for its leading idea the proclamation of freedom to American slaves; but her refusal was owing to the circumstance that she was herself a great slaveholding power, and she had no thought of establishing a precedent that might soon have been used with fatal effect against herself.  She did not close her ears to the proposition because she had any doubt as to her right to avail herself of an offer of freedom to slaves, or because she supposed that to make such an offer would be to act immorally, but because it was inexpedient for her to proceed to extremities with us, due regard being had to her own interests.  Had slavery been abolished in her dominions twenty years earlier, she would have acted against American slavery in 1812-15, and probably with entire success.  President Lincoln does not purpose going so far as England could have gone with perfect propriety.  She could have proclaimed freedom to American slaves without limitation.  He has regard to the character of the war that exists, and so his Proclamation is not threat, but a warning.  In substance, he tells the Rebels, that, if they shall persist in their rebellion after a certain date, their slaves shall be made free, if it shall be in his power to liberate them.  He gives them exactly one hundred days in which to make their election between submission and slavery and resistance and ruin; and these hundred days may become as noted in history as those Hundred Days which formed the second reign of Napoleon I., as well through the consequences of the action that shall mark their course as through the gravity of that action itself.

Objections have been made to the time of issuing the Proclamation.  Why, it has been asked, spring it so suddenly upon the country?  Why publish it just as the tide of war was turning in our favor?  Why not wait, and see what the effect would be on the Southern mind of the victories won in Maryland?—­We have no knowledge of the immediate reasons that moved the President to select the twenty-second of September for the date of his Proclamation; but we can see three reasons why that day was a good one for the deed which thereon was done.  The President may have argued, (1,) that the American mind had been brought up to