the permanent acquiescence in slavery.  If we may judge from reiteration in his speeches, no sophism angered him quite so much as the very popular sophism which defended slavery by presenting a literal equality as the real alternative to it.  “I protest against the counterfeit logic which says that since I do not want a negro woman for my slave I must necessarily want her for my wife.  I may want her for neither.  I may simply let her alone.  In some respects she is certainly not my equal.  But in her natural right to eat the bread which she has earned by the sweat of her brow, she is my equal and the equal of any man.”

The men who had made the Union had, as Lincoln contended, and in regard to most of them contended justly, been true to principle in their dealing with slavery.  “They yielded to slavery,” he insists, “what the necessity of the case required, and they yielded nothing more.”  It was, as we know, impossible for them in federating America, however much they might hope to inspire the new nation with just ideas, to take the power of legislating as to slavery within each existing State out of the hands of that State.  Such power as they actually possessed of striking at slavery they used, as we have seen and as Lincoln recounted in detail, with all promptitude and almost to its fullest extent.  They reasonably believed, though wrongly, that the natural tendency of opinion throughout the now freed Colonies with principles of freedom in the air would work steadily towards emancipation.  “The fathers,” Lincoln could fairly say, “place slavery, where the public mind could rest in the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction.”  The task for statesmen now was “to put slavery back where the fathers placed it.”

Now this by no means implied that slavery in the States which now adhered to it should be exposed to attack from outside, or the slave owner be denied any right which he could claim under the Constitution, however odious and painful it might be, as in the case of the rendition of fugitive slaves, to yield him his rights.  “We allow,” says Lincoln, “slavery to exist in the slave States, not because it is right, but from the necessities of the Union.  We grant a fugitive slave law because it is so ‘nominated in the bond’; because our fathers so stipulated—­had to—­and we are bound to carry out this agreement.”  And the obligations to the slave owners and the slave States, which this original agreement and the fundamental necessities of the Union involved, must be fulfilled unswervingly, in spirit as well as in the letter.  Lincoln was ready to give the slave States any possible guarantee that the Constitution should not be altered so as to take away their existing right of self-government in the matter of slavery.  He had remained in the past coldly aloof from the Abolitionist propaganda when Herndon and other friends tried to interest him in it, feeling, it seems, that agitation in the free