objects?  We can succeed only by concert.  It is not ’Can any of us imagine better?’ but; ‘Can we all do better?’ Object whatsoever is possible, still the question recurs, ‘Can we do better?’ The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.  The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.  As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.  We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

“Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.  We, of this Congress and this administration, will [shall] be remembered in spite of ourselves.  No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.  The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.  We say we are for the Union.  The world will not forget that we say this.  We know how to save the Union.  The world knows we do know how to save it.  We—­even we here—­hold the power and bear the responsibility.  In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free,—­honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.  We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.  Other means may succeed; this could not fail.  The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just,—­a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”

Beautiful and impressive as was this appeal, it persuaded few or none.  In fact, no effort on the President’s part now, or at any time, could win much approval for his plan.  Not many were ever pleased by it; but afterward, in the winter of 1863, many members of the Thirty-eighth Congress were willing, without believing in it, to give him a chance to try it in Missouri.  Accordingly a bill then passed the House appropriating $10,000,000 to compensate slave-owners in that State, if abolition of slavery should be made part of its organic law.  The Senate made the sum $15,000,000 and returned the bill to the House for concurrence.  But the representatives from Missouri were tireless in their hostility to the measure, and finally killed it by parliamentary expedients of delay.

This was a great disappointment to Mr. Lincoln.  While the measure was pending he argued strenuously with leading Missourians to induce them to put their State in the lead in what he hoped would then become a procession of slave States.  But these gentlemen seemed to fear that, if they should take United States bonds in payment, they might awake some morning in these troublous times to find their promiser a bankrupt or a repudiationist.  On the other hand, such was the force of habit that a slave seemed to them very tangible property.  Mr. Lincoln shrewdly suggested that, amid present conditions, “bonds were better than bondsmen,” and “two-legged property” was a very bad kind to hold.  Time proved him to be entirely right; but for the present his argument, entreaty, and humor were all alike useless.  Missouri would have nothing to do with “compensated emancipation;” and since she was regarded as a test case, the experiment was not tried elsewhere.  So it came to pass afterward that the slaveholders parted with their slaves for nothing instead of exchanging them for the six per cent. bonds of the United States.