obstinacy has caused me to forego the resolve of my life." Passages like these read tamely afterwards, but, at the moment, they produced an effect upon the audience which was absolutely startling; and when he finished speaking, after two hours or more, the audience still lingered in their seats, as though they were unwilling to break the spell.

THE PROCLAMATION AND THE BORDER

STATES.

I HAVE often heard it asserted, and I have seen the statement constantly repeated in the English press, that slavery had nothing to do with the questions at issue between the North and South. I can only say, that during my residence in Washington, I heard little talked about except the question of slavery. At the time I arrived there, the chief discussion was, whether the President would or would not issue a proclamation advocating emancipation. At last, after much hesitation, Mr. Lincoln published the manifesto of the 6th of March, proposing gradual emancipation throughout the Slave States. The gist of that proclamation lay in the first paragraph. "The United States ought to cooperate with any State which may adopt a gradual "abolishment of slavery, giving to such State pecuniary aid, to be used by it in its discretion to compensate "for the inconvenience, public and private, produced by "such change of system." This step, unimportant as it

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may appear, was the first of that long series of measures which has culminated in the final decree of abolition. It is as such that I write of it.

I remember, at the time the proclamation appeared, speaking to Mr. Sumner upon the subject. He pointed out to me the imminent danger lest the state of feeling existing between England and America should sooner or later lead to a war between our two countries; and suggested, as the only hope he could see of escaping the calamity, that England should join America in crushing out what he then conceived were the last struggles of the insurgents. To this remark my answer was one which I conceive most Englishmen would have made, that, with our Government there was no possibility of such a step being taken, unless the country was strongly in favour of the North, and that the only way to rouse public feeling in England in favour of the North was to convince Englishmen that the war was being carried on for the bond fide abolition of slavery. Mr. Sumner's reply was, " Is it possible that England can fail "to see that this war is being carried on for this object "after the publication of the President's message?"

Now there is no question that England did fail to see this. I suspect that most Englishmen, who, like myself, hate slavery, read this message at first with disappointment. "Is this all?" was my conclusion at its perusal. Here, at the crisis of a nation's fate, when, for the first time, the power is in the hands of the North; when the

South, in popular opinion, was soon to be at the mercy of the victorious Union, the utmost that the Government proposed was, that the status quo should be restored as regarded slavery, coupled with an abstract resolution, that if any Slave State, of its own free will and good pleasure, chose to abolish slavery, the United States Government should assist it in its good intentions by pecuniary aid. Such, I own freely, was my first impression. But subsequent conversations with American politicians led me to believe that the Emancipation Message, as it was called at the time, was capable of a far higher and more hopeful construction. Subsequent events, I need hardly say, have convinced me that, in this instance, second thoughts were the best.

In the first place, then, this step was the furthest one which the President at the time could take consistently with the Constitution. The great mistake which foreigners appeared to me to make in arguing about America is the assumption that the Government, if it likes, can do everything. Assuming that the Crown, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons, or, in other words, the Government of England, were agreed together, it is hard to say what measures they might not pass legally. And I observe that Englishmen generally assume that, practically, the American Government could do the same. Now, the vital defect of the Union seems to me to be that it exists by means of, and in virtue of, a written Constitution, and that by

this very constitution the absolute as well as the relative powers of the different bodies in the State are so clearly defined, that, in cases not provided for by the Constitution, Government action is paralyzed.

The States which composed the Union, in the words of Justice Story, "yielded anything reluctantly, and “deemed the least practical delegation of power quite "sufficient for national purposes." This, to my mind, is the key to the whole American Constitution. The course of events, the progress of civilization, has gradually increased the practical power of the Central Government, but the legal rights of the component States remain unimpaired. Now, if there are two privileges clearly guaranteed by the Constitution to the dif ferent States, they are the right of each State to regulate its domestic institutions, and the existence of the Fugitive Slave Law. To amend the Constitution requires a majority of three-fourths of the legislatures or conventions of the States composing the Union; and, therefore, if the Government of the United States wished to abolish slavery in the different States, they must either have declared that the consent of the insurgent States was not required, which was tantamount to confessing that the Union was at an end, or else they must have broken through the Constitution, in strength of which alone they had any legal existence. The State of New York might to-morrow re-establish slavery as an institution consistently with the law, and, by the same law, the