The practical policy, then, on which his whole efforts were concentrated consisted in this single point—­the express recognition of the essential evil of slavery by the enactment that it should not spread further in the Territories subject to the Union.  If slavery were thus shut up within a ring fence and marked as a wrong thing which the Union as a whole might tolerate but would not be a party to, emancipation in the slave States would follow in course of time.  It would come about, Lincoln certainly thought, in a way far better for the slaves as well as for their masters, than any forced liberation.  He was content to wait for it.  “I do not mean that when it takes a turn towards ultimate extinction, it will be in a day, nor in a year, nor in two years.  I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at least, but that it will occur in the best way for both races in God’s own good time I have no doubt.”  If we wonder whether this policy, if soon enough adopted by the Union as a whole, would really have brought on emancipation in the South, the best answer is that, when the policy did receive national sanction by the election of Lincoln, the principal slave States themselves instinctively recognised it as fatal to slavery.

For the extinction of slavery he would wait; for a decision on the principle of slavery he would not.  It was idle to protest against agitation of the question.  If politicians would be silent that would not get rid of “this same mighty deep-seated power that somehow operates on the minds of men, exciting them and stirring them up in every avenue of society—­in politics, in religion, in literature, in morals, in all the manifold relations of life.”  The stand, temperate as it was, that he advocated against slavery should be taken at once and finally.  The difference, of which people grown accustomed to slavery among their neighbours thought little, between letting it be in Missouri, which they could not help, and letting it cross the border into Kansas, which they could help, appeared to Lincoln the whole tremendous gulf between right and wrong, between a wise people’s patience with ills they could not cure and a profligate people’s acceptance of evil as their good.  And here there was a distinction between Lincoln and many Republicans, which again may seem subtle, but which was really far wider than that which separated him from the Abolitionists.  Slavery must be stopped from spreading into Kansas not because, as it turned out, the immigrants into Kansas mostly did not want it, but because it was wrong, and the United States, where they were free to act, would not have it.  The greatest evil in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was the laxity of public tone which had made it possible.  “Little by little, but steadily as man’s march to the grave, we have been giving up the old faith for the new faith.”  Formerly some deference to the “central idea”