Those principles he found in the Declaration of Independence.  Its rhetorical inexactitude gave him no trouble, and must not, now that its language is out of fashion, blind us to the fact that the founders of the United States did deliberately aspire to found a commonwealth in which common men and women should count for more than elsewhere, and in which, as we might now phrase it, all authority must defer somewhat to the interests and to the sentiments of the under dog.  “Public opinion on any subject,” he said, “always has a ‘central idea’ from which all its minor thoughts radiate.  The ‘central idea’ in our public opinion at the beginning was, and till recently has continued to be, ’the equality of man’; and, although it has always submitted patiently to whatever inequality seemed to be a matter of actual necessity, its constant working has been a steady and progressive effort towards the practical equality of all men.”  The fathers, he said again, had never intended any such obvious untruth as that equality actually existed, or that any action of theirs could immediately create it; but they had set up a standard to which continual approximation could be made.

So far as white men were concerned such approximation had actually taken place; the audiences Lincoln addressed were fully conscious that very many thousands had found in the United States a scope to lead their own lives which the traditions and institutions no less than the physical conditions of their former countries had denied them.  There was no need for him to enlarge on this fact; but there are repeated indications of the distaste and alarm with which he witnessed a demand that newcomers from Europe, or some classes of them, should be accorded lesser privileges than they had enjoyed.

But notions of freedom and equality as applied to the negroes presented a real difficulty.  “There is,” said Lincoln, “a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people at the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black men.” (We might perhaps add that as the inferior race becomes educated and rises in status it is likely itself to share the same disgust.) Lincoln himself disliked the thought of intermarriage between the races.  He by no means took it for granted that equality in political power must necessarily and properly follow upon emancipation.  Schemes for colonial settlement of the negroes in Africa, or for gradual emancipation accompanied by educational measures, appealed to his sympathy.  It was not given him to take a part in the settlement after the war, and it is impossible to guess what he would have achieved as a constructive statesman; but it is certain that he would have proceeded with caution and with the patience of sure faith; and he had that human sympathy with the white people of the South, and no less with the slaves themselves, which taught him the difficulty of the problem.  But difficult as the problem was, one solution was certainly wrong, and that was