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 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 the war. How much better to do it
while we can, lest the war erelong 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 never could 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."

He closed with an ardent appeal to his hearers, as "patriots and
statesmen," to consider his proposition, invoking them thereto as they
"would perpetuate popular government for the best people in the world."

Thirty gentlemen listened to this paper and took two days to consider
it. Then twenty of them signed a response which was, in substance, their
repudiation of the President's scheme. They told him that hitherto they
had been loyal "under the most discouraging circumstances and in face of