whose guilt the whole country, North and South, seemed to him an accomplice.  He would have classed that very natural indignation under the head of “malice”—­“I shall do nothing in malice,” he wrote to a citizen of Louisiana; “what I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.”  But it was not, as we shall see before long, too vast for an interest, as sympathetic as it was matter of fact, in the welfare of the negroes.  They were actual human beings to him, and he knew that the mere abrogation of the law of slavery was not the only thing necessary to their advancement.  Looking back, with knowledge of what happened later, we cannot fail to be glad that they were emancipated somehow, but we are forced to regret that they could not have been emancipated by some more considerate process.  Lincoln, perhaps alone among the Americans who were in earnest in this matter, looked at it very much in the light in which all men look at it to-day.

In the early part of 1862 the United States Government concluded a treaty with Great Britain for the more effectual suppression of the African slave trade, and it happened about the same time that the first white man ever executed as a pirate under the American law against the slave trade was hanged in New York.  In those months Lincoln was privately trying to bring about the passing by the Legislature of Delaware of an Act for emancipating, with fit provisions for their welfare, the few slaves in that State, conditionally upon compensation to be paid to the owners by the United States.  He hoped that if this example were set by Delaware, it would be followed in Maryland, and would spread later.  The Delaware House were favourable to the scheme, but the Senate of the State rejected it.  Lincoln now made a more public appeal in favour of his policy.  In March, 1862, he sent a Message to Congress, which has already been quoted, and in which he urged the two Houses to pass Resolutions pledging the United States to give pecuniary help to any State which adopted gradual emancipation.  It must be obvious that if the slave States of the North could have been led to adopt this policy it would have been a fitting preliminary to any action which might be taken against slavery in the South; and the policy might have been extended to those Southern States which were first recovered for the Union.  The point, however, upon which Lincoln dwelt in his Message was that, if slavery were once given up by the border States, the South would abandon all hope that they would ever join the Confederacy.  In private letters to an editor of a newspaper and others he pressed the consideration that the cost of compensated abolition was small in proportion to what might be gained by a quicker ending of the war.  During the discussion of his proposal in Congress and again after the end of the Session he invited the Senators and Representatives of the border States to private conference with him in which he besought of them “a