There can be no doubt of his earnestness about this.  But the Republican leaders, honourably enough, regarded this as an unpractical line to take, and indeed to the political historian this is the most crucial question in American history.  Nobody can say that civil war would or would not have occurred if this or that had been done a little differently, but Abraham Lincoln, at this crisis of his life, did, in pursuance of his peculiarly cherished principle, forge at least a link in the chain of events which actually precipitated the war.  And he did it knowing better than any other man that he was doing something of great national importance, involving at least great national risk.  Was he pursuing his principles, moderate as they were in the original conception, with fanaticism, or at the best preferring a solemn consistency of theory to the conscientious handling of facts not reducible to theory?  As a question of practical statesmanship in the largest sense, how did matters really stand in regard to slavery and to the relations between South and North, and what was Lincoln’s idea of “putting slavery back where the fathers placed it” really worth?

Herndon in these days went East to try to enlist the support of the great men for Lincoln.  He found them friendly but immovable.  Editor Horace Greeley said to him:  “The Republican standard is too high; we want something practical.”  This, we may be pretty sure, stiffened Lincoln’s back, as a man with a cause that he cared for, and, for that matter, as a really shrewd manager in a party which he thought stood for something.  It reveals the flabbiness which the Northerners were in danger of making a governing tradition of policy.  The wrongfulness of any extension of slavery might be loudly asserted in 1854, but in 1858, when it no longer looked as if so great an extension of it was really imminent, there was no harm in shifting towards some less provocative principle on which more people at the moment might agree.  Confronted with Northern politicians who would reason in this fashion stood a united South whose leaders were by now accustomed to make the Union Government go which way they chose and had no sort of disposition to compromise their principle in the least.  “What,” as Lincoln put it in an address given, not long after his contest with Douglas, at the Cooper Institute in New York, “what do you think will content the South?” “Nothing,” he answered, “but an acknowledgment that slavery is right.”  “Holding as they do that slavery is morally right and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right and a social blessing.  Nor can we justifiably withhold this on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong.”  That being so, there was no use, he said, in “groping about for some middle ground between right and wrong,” or in “a policy of ‘don’t care’ on a question about which all true men do care.”  And there is ample evidence that he understood rightly