if it may be said with respect, there has existed from of old a fashionable circle not convinced of its own gentility and insisting the more rigorously on minor decorum, Lincoln went to the opera, and history still deplores that this misguided man went there and sat there with his large hands in black kid gloves. Here perhaps it is well to say that the educated world of the Eastern States, including those who privately deplored Lincoln's supposed unfitness, treated its untried chief magistrate with that engrained good breeding to which it was utterly indifferent how plain a man he might be. His lesser speeches as he went were unstudied appeals to loyalty, with very simple avowals of inadequacy to his task, and expressions of reliance on the people's support when he tried to do his duty. To a man who can sometimes speak from the heart and to the heart as Lincoln did it is perhaps not given to be uniformly felicitous. Among these speeches was that delivered at Philadelphia, which has already been quoted, but most of them were not considered felicitous at the time. They were too unpretentious. Moreover, they contained sentences which seemed to understate the gravity of the crisis in a way which threw doubt on his own serious statesmanship. Whether they were felicitous or not, the intention of these much-criticised utterances was the best proof of his statesmanship. He would appeal to the steady loyalty of the North, but he was not going to arouse its passion. He assumed to the last that calm reflection might prevail in the South, which was menaced by nothing but "an artificial crisis." He referred to war as a possibility, but left no doubt of his own wish by all means to avoid it. "There will," he said, "be no bloodshed unless it be forced on the Government. The Government will not use force unless force is used against it."

Before he passed through Baltimore he received earnest communications from Seward and from General Scott. Each had received trustworthy information of a plot, which existed, to murder him in that city. Owing to their warnings he went through Baltimore secretly at

night, so that his arrival in Washington, on February 23, was unexpected. This was his obvious duty, and nobody who knew him was ever in doubt of his personal intrepidity; but of course it helped to damp the effect of what many people would have been glad to regard as a triumphal progress.

On March 4, 1861, old Buchanan came in his carriage to escort his successor to the inaugural ceremony, where it was the ironical fate of Chief Justice Taney to administer the oath to a President who had already gone far to undo his great work. Yet a third notable Democrat was there to do a pleasant little act. Douglas, Lincoln's defeated rival, placed himself with a fine ostentation by his side, and, observing that he was embarrassed as to where to put his new tall hat and preposterous goldknobbed cane, took charge of these encumbrances before the moment arrived for the most eagerly awaited of all his speeches. Lincoln had submitted his draft of his "First Inaugural" to Seward, and this draft with Seward's abundant suggestions of amendment has been preserved. It has considerable literary interest, and, by the readiness with which most of Seward's suggestions were adopted, and the decision with which some, and those not the least important, were set aside by Lincoln, it illustrates well the working relation which, after one short struggle, was to be established between these two men. By Seward's advice Lincoln added to an otherwise dry speech some concluding paragraphs of emotional appeal. The last sentence of the speech, which alone is much remembered, is Seward's in the first conception of it, Seward's in the slightly hackneyed phrase with which it ends, Lincoln's alone in the touch of haunting beauty which is on it.

His "First Inaugural" was by general confession an able state paper, setting forth simply and well a situation with which we are now familiar. It sets out dispassionately the state of the controversy on slavery, lays down with brief argument the position that the Union is indissoluble, and proceeds to define the duty of the Gov

'The

ernment in face of an attempt to dissolve it. power," he said, "confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government, and to collect the duties on imports; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere. The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be furnished in all parts of the Union." He proceeded to set out what he conceived to be the impossibility of real separation; the intimate relations between the peoples of the several States must still continue; they would still remain for adjustment after any length of warfare; they could be far better adjusted in Union than in enmity. He concluded: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. I am loath to close. We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

4. The Outbreak of War.

Upon the newly-inaugurated President there now descended a swarm of office-seekers. The Republican party had never been in power before, and these patriotic people exceeded in number and voracity those that had assailed any American President before. To be acces sible to all such was the normal duty of a President; it was perhaps additionally incumbent on him at this time. When in the course of nature the number of office-seekers abated, they were succeeded, as will be seen, by supplicants of another kind, whose petitions were often really harrowing. The horror of this enduring visitation has

been described by Artemus Ward in terms which Lincoln himself could not have improved upon. His classical treatment of the subject is worth serious reference; for it should be realised that Lincoln, who had both to learn his new trade of statecraft and to exercise it in a terrible emergency, did so with a large part of each day necessarily consumed by worrying and distasteful tasks of a much paltrier kind.

On the day after the Inauguration came word from Major Anderson at Fort Sumter that he could only hold out a few weeks longer unless reinforced and provisioned. With it came to Lincoln the opinion of General Scott, that to relieve Fort Sumter now would require a force of 20,000 men, which did not exist. The Cabinet was summoned with military and naval advisers. The sailors thought they could throw men and provisions into Fort Sumter; the soldiers said the ships would be destroyed by the Confederate batteries. Lincoln asked his Cabinet whether, assuming it to be feasible, it was politically advisable now to provision Fort Sumter. Blair said yes. emphatically; Chase said yes in a qualified way. The other five members of the Cabinet said no; General Scott had given his opinion, as on a military question, that the fort should now be evacuated; they argued that the evacuation of this one fort would be recognised by the country as merely a military necessity arising from the neglect of the last administration. Lincoln reserved his decision.

Let us conceive the effect of a decision to evacuate Fort Sumter. South Carolina had for long claimed it as a due acknowledgment of its sovereign and independent rights, and for no other end; the Confederacy now claimed it and its first act had been to send Beauregard to threaten the fort. Even Buchanan had ended by withstanding these claims. The assertion that he would hold these forts had been the gist of Lincoln's Inaugural. This was the one fort that was in the eyes of the Northern public or the Southern public either; they probably never realised that there were other forts, Fort Pickens, for example, on the Gulf of Mexico, which the administra

tion was prepared to defend. And now it was proposed that Lincoln, who had put down his foot with a bang yesterday, should take it up with a shuffle to-day. And Lincoln reserved his judgment; and, which is much more, went on reserving it till the question nearly settled itself to his disgrace.

Lincoln lacked here, it would seem, not by any means the qualities of the trained administrator, but just that rough perception and vigour which untaught genius might be supposed to possess. The passionate Jackson (who, by the way, was a far more educated man in the respects which count) would not have acted so. Lincoln, it is true, had declared that he would take no provocative step" In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war," and the risk which he would have taken by overruling that day the opinion of the bulk of his Cabinet based on that of his chief military adviser is obvious, but it seems to have been a lesser risk than he did take in delaying so long to overrule his Cabinet. It is precisely characteristic of his strength and of his weakness that he did not at once yield to his advisers; that he long continued weighing the matter undisturbed by the danger of delay; that he decided as soon as and no sooner than he felt sure as to the political results, which alone here mattered, for the military consequences amounted to nothing.

This story was entangled from the first with another difficult story. Commissioners from the Southern Confederacy came to Washington and sought interviews with Seward; they came to treat for the recognition of the Confederacy and the peaceful surrender of forts and the like within its borders. Meanwhile the action of Virginia was in the balance, and the "Peace Convention," summoned by Virginia, still "threshing again," as Lowell said, "the already twice-threshed straw of debate." The action of Virginia and of other border States, about which Lincoln was intensely solicitous, would certainly depend upon the action of the Government towards the States