States against laws which existed constitutionally in the slave States was not only futile but improper.  With all his power he dissuaded his more impulsive friends from lending any aid to forcible and unlawful proceedings in defence of freedom in Kansas.  “The battle of freedom,” he exclaims in a vehement plea for what may be called moderate as against radical policy, “is to be fought out on principle.  Slavery is violation of eternal right.  We have temporised with it from the necessities of our condition; but as sure as God reigns and school children read, that black foul lie can never be consecrated into God’s hallowed truth.”  In other words, the sure way and the only way to combat slavery lay in the firm and the scrupulous assertion of principles which would carry the reason and the conscience of the people with them; the repeal of the prohibition of slavery in the Territories was a defiance of such principles, but so too in its way was the disregard by Abolitionists of the rights covenanted to the slave States.  This side of Lincoln’s doctrine is apt to jar upon us.  We feel with a great American historian that the North would have been depraved indeed if it had not bred Abolitionists, and it requires an effort to sympathise with Lincoln’s rigidly correct feeling—­sometimes harshly expressed and sometimes apparently cold.  It is not possible to us, as it was to him a little later, to look on John Brown’s adventure merely as a crime.  Nor can we wonder that, when he was President and Civil War was raging, many good men in the North mistook him and thought him half-hearted, because he persisted in his respect for the rights of the Slave States so long as there seemed to be a chance of saving the Union in that way.  It was his primary business, he then said, to save the Union if he could; “if I could save the Union by emancipating all the slaves I would do so; if I could save it by emancipating none of them, I would do it; if I could save it by emancipating some and not others, I would do that too.”  But, as in the letter at the beginning of this chapter he called Speed to witness, his forbearance with slavery cost him real pain, and we shall misread both his policy as President and his character as a man if we fail to see that in the bottom of his mind he felt this forbearance to be required by the very same principles which roused him against the extension of the evil.  Years before, he had written to an Abolitionist correspondent that respect for the rights of the slave States was due not only to the Constitution but, “as it seems to me, in a sense to freedom itself.”  Negro slavery was not the only important issue, nor was it an isolated issue.  What really was in issue was the continuance of the nation “dedicated,” as he said on a great occasion, “to the proposition that all men are equal,” a nation founded by the Union of self-governing communities, some of which lagged far behind the others in applying in their own midst the elementary principles of freedom, but yet a nation actuated from its very foundation in some important respects by the acknowledgment of human rights.