of last March, the war would now be substantially ended.  And the plan therein proposed is yet one of the most potent and swift means of ending it.  Let the States which are in rebellion see definitely and certainly that in no event will the States you represent ever join their proposed confederacy, and they cannot much longer maintain the contest.  But you cannot divest them of their hope to ultimately have you with them so long as you show a determination to perpetuate the institution within your own States.  Beat them at elections, as you have overwhelmingly done, and, nothing daunted, they still claim you as their own.  You and I know what the lever of their power is.  Break that lever before their faces, and they can shake you no more forever.  Most of you have treated me with kindness and consideration and I trust you will not now think I improperly touch what is exclusively your own, when, for the sake of the whole country, I ask, Can you, for your States, do better than to take the course I urge?  Discarding punctilio and maxims adapted to more manageable times, and looking only to the unprecedentedly stern facts of our case, can you do better in any possible event?  You prefer that the constitutional relation of the States to the nation shall be practically restored without disturbance of the institution; and if this were done, my whole duty in this respect, under the Constitution and my oath of office, would be performed.  But it is not done, and we are trying to accomplish it by war.  The incidents of the war cannot be avoided.  If the war continues long, as it must if the object be not sooner attained, the institution in your States will be extinguished by mere friction and abrasion—­by the mere incidents of the war.  It will be gone, and you will have nothing valuable in lieu of it.  Much of its value is gone already.  How much better for you and for your people to take the step which at once shortens the war and secures substantial compensation for that which is sure to be wholly lost in any other event!  How much better to thus save the money which else we sink forever in war!  How much better to do it while we can, lest the war ere long render us pecuniarily unable to do it!  How much better for you as seller, and the nation as buyer, to sell out and buy out that without which the war could never have been, than to sink both the thing to be sold and the price of it in cutting one another’s throats!  I do not speak of emancipation at once, but of a decision at once to emancipate gradually.  Room in South America for colonization can be obtained cheaply and in abundance, and when numbers shall be large enough to be company and encouragement for one another, the freed people will not be so reluctant to go.