feeling was still widely prevalent in the loyal States.  In July, 1862, General McClellan said, warningly, that a declaration of radical views on the slavery question would rapidly disintegrate and destroy the Union armies.  Finally, it seemed hardly doubtful that fatal defections would take place in the Border States, even if they should not formally go over to the Confederacy.  No man saw the value of those Border States as Mr. Lincoln did.  To save or to lose them was probably to save or lose the war; to lose them and the war was to establish a powerful slave empire.  Where did abolition come in among these events?  It was not there!

[Illustration:  Simon Cameron]

Painfully, therefore, untiringly, with all the skill and tact in his power, Mr. Lincoln struggled to hold those invaluable, crucial States.  His “border-state policy” soon came to be discussed as the most interesting topic of which men could talk wherever they came together.  Savage were the maledictions which emancipationists uttered against it, and the intensity of their feeling is indicated by the fact that, though that policy was carried out, and though the nation, in due time, gathered the ripe and perfect fruit of it both in the integrity of the country and the abolition of slavery, yet even at the present day many old opponents of President Lincoln, survivors of the Thirty-seventh Congress, remain unshaken in the faith that his famous policy was “a cruel and fatal mistake.”

By the summer of 1862 the opinions and the action of Mr. Lincoln in all these matters had brought him into poor standing in the estimation of many Republicans.  The great majority of the politicians of the party and sundry newspaper editors, that is to say, those persons who chiefly make the noise and the show before the world, were busily engaged in condemning his policy.  The headquarters of this disaffection were in Washington.  It had one convert even within the cabinet, where the secretary of the treasury was thoroughly infected with the notion that the President was fatally inefficient, laggard, and unequal to the occasion.  The feeling was also especially rife in congressional circles.  Mr. Julian, than whom there can be no better witness, says:  “No one at a distance could have formed any adequate conception of the hostility of Republican members toward Mr. Lincoln at the final adjournment [the middle of July], while it was the belief of many that our last session of Congress had been held in Washington.  Mr. Wade said the country was going to hell, and that the scenes witnessed in the French Revolution were nothing in comparison with what we should see here.”  If most of the people at the North had not had heads more cool and sensible than was the one which rested upon the shoulders of the ardent “Ben” Wade, the alarming prediction of that lively spokesman might have been fulfilled.  Fortunately, however, as Mr. Julian admits, “the feeling in Congress was far more