Mr. Theodore Roosevelt in his addresses to the veterans of the Civil War has been heard to assert that the crisis teaches us a much-needed lesson as to the supreme value of moral energy.  It would have been much pleasanter and cheaper to let the South secede, but the people of the North preferred to pay the cost of justifiable coercion in blood and treasure than to submit to the danger and humiliation of peaceable rebellion.  Doubtless the foregoing is sometimes a wholesome lesson on which to insist, but it is by no means the only lesson suggested by the event.  The Abolitionists had not shirked their duty as they understood it.  They had given their property and their lives to the anti-slavery agitation.  But they were as willing as the worst Copperheads to permit the secession of the South, because of the erroneous and limited character of their political ideas.  While the crisis had undoubtedly been, in a large measure, brought about by moral lethargy, and it could only be properly faced by a great expenditure of moral energy, it had also been brought about quite as much by political unintelligence; and the salvation of the Union depended primarily and emphatically upon a better understanding on the part of Northern public opinion of the issues involved.  Confused as was the counsel offered to them, and distracting as were their habits of political thought, the people of the North finally disentangled the essential question, and then supported loyally the man who, more than any other single political leader, had properly defined the issue.

That man was Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln’s peculiar service to his countrymen before the war was that of seeing straighter and thinking harder than did his contemporaries.  No doubt he must needs have courage, also, for in the beginning he acted against the advice of his Republican associates.  But in 1858 there were plenty of men who had the courage, whereas there were very few who had Lincoln’s disciplined intelligence and his just and penetrating insight.  Lincoln’s vision placed every aspect of the situation in its proper relations; and he was as fully competent to detect the logical weakness of his opponent’s position as he was to explain his own lucidly, candidly, and persuasively.  It so happened that the body of public opinion which he particularly addressed was that very part of the American democracy most likely to be deluded into allowing the Southern leaders to have their will, yet whose adhesion to the national cause was necessary to the preservation of the Union.  It was into this mass of public opinion, after the announcement of his senatorial candidacy, that he hammered a new and a hard truth.  He was the first responsible politician to draw the logical inference from the policy of the Republican party.  The Constitution was inadequate to cure the ills it generated.  By its authorization of slavery it established an institution whose legality did not prevent it from being anti-national.  That institution must either