The message is not such a document as a full-grown, independent man should publish to the nation at such a time as the present, when positions should be freely and fully defined.”  In the Senate, Mr. Powell of Kentucky translated the second paragraph into blunt words.  He said that it held a threat of ultimate coercion, if the cooperative plan should fail; and he regarded “the whole thing” as “a pill of arsenic, sugar-coated.”

But, though so many insisted upon uttering their fleers in debate, yet, when it came to voting, they could not well discredit their President by voting down the resolution on the sole ground that it was foolish and ineffectual.  So, after it had been abused sufficiently, it was passed by about the usual party majority:  89 to 34 in the House; 32 to 10 in the Senate.  Thus Congress somewhat sneeringly handed back to the President his bantling, with free leave to do what he could with it.

Not discouraged by such grudging and unsympathetic permission, Mr. Lincoln at once set about his experiment.  He told Lovejoy and Arnold, strenuous Abolitionists, but none the less his near friends, that they would live to see the end of slavery, if only the Border States would cooperate in his project.  On March 10, 1862, he gathered some of the border-state members and tried to win them over to his views.  They listened coldly; but he was not dismayed by their demeanor, and on July 12 he again convened them, and this time laid before them a written statement.  This paper betrays by its earnestness of argument and its almost beseeching tone that he wrote it from his heart.  The reasons which he urged were as follows:—­

“Believing that you of the Border States hold more power for good than any other equal number of members, I felt it a duty which I cannot justifiably waive to make this appeal to you.

“I intend no reproach or complaint when I assure you that, in my opinion, if you all had voted for the resolution in the gradual emancipation message of last March, the war would now be substantially ended.

“And the plan therein proposed is yet one of the most potent and swift means of ending it.  Let the States which are in rebellion see definitely and certainly that in no event will the States you represent ever join their proposed Confederacy, and they cannot much longer maintain the contest.  But you cannot divest them of their hope to ultimately have you with them as long as you show a determination to perpetuate the institution within your own States; beat them at election as you have overwhelmingly done, and, nothing daunted, they still claim you as their own.  You and I know what the lever of their power is.  Break that lever before their faces, and they can shake you no more forever.  Most of you have treated me with kindness and consideration; and I trust you will not now think I improperly touch what is exclusively your own, when, for the sake of the whole country, I ask:  can you, for your States,