said, perhaps more elaborately, the same.  If Lincoln had not stood square upon that platform there were others like Senator Wade of Ohio and Senator Grimes of Iowa who might have done so and might have been able to wreck the compromise.  Lincoln, however, did wreck it, at a time when it seemed likely to succeed, and it is most probable that thereby he caused the Civil War.  It cannot be said that he definitely expected the Civil War.  Probably he avoided making any definite forecast; but he expressed no alarm, and he privately told a friend about this time that “he could not in his heart believe that the South designed the overthrow of the Government.”  But, if he had in his heart believed it, nothing in his life gives reason to think that he would have been more anxious to conciliate the South; on the contrary, it is in line with all we know of his feelings to suppose that he would have thought firmness all the more imperative.  We cannot recall the solemnity of his long-considered speech about “a house divided against itself,” with which all his words and acts accorded, without seeing that, if perhaps he speculated little about the risks, he was prepared to face them whatever they were.  Doubtless he took a heavy responsibility, but it is painful to find honourable historians, who heartily dislike the cause of slavery, capable to-day of wondering whether he was right to do so.  “If he had not stood square” in December upon the same “platform” on which he had stood in May, if he had preferred to enroll himself among those statesmen of all countries whose strongest words are uttered for their own subsequent enjoyment in eating them, he might conceivably have saved much bloodshed, but he would not have left the United States a country of which any good man was proud to be a citizen.

Thus, by the end of 1860, the bottom was really out of the policy of compromise, and it is not worth while to examine the praiseworthy efforts that were still made for it while State after State in the South was deciding to secede.  One interesting proposal, which was aired in January, 1861, deserves notice, namely, that the terms of compromise proposed by Crittenden should have been submitted to a vote of the whole people.  It was not passed.  Seward, whom many people now thought likely to catch at any and every proposal for a settlement, said afterwards with justice that it was “unconstitutional and ineffectual.”  Ineffectual it would have been in this sense:  the compromise would in all probability have been carried by a majority consisting of men in the border States and of all those elsewhere who, though they feared war and desired good feeling, had no further definite opinion upon the chief questions at issue; but it would have left a local majority in many of the Southern States and a local majority in many of the Northern States as irreconcilable with each other as ever.  It was opposed also to the spirit of the Constitution.  In a great country where the