Certainly you will all appreciate his exquisite sympathy with the
suffering relatives of those who had fallen in battle. His heart bled
with theirs. Never was there a more gentle and tender utterance than his
letter to a mother who had given all her sons to her country, written at
a time when the angel of death had visited almost every household in the
land, and was already hovering over him.

"I have been shown," he says, "in the files of the War Department a
statement that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously
on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words
of mine which should attempt to beguile you from your grief for a loss so
overwhelming but I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation
which may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I
pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement
and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and the lost, and
the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice
upon the altar of freedom."

Hardly could your illustrious sovereign, from the depths of her queenly
and womanly heart, have spoken words more touching and tender to soothe
the stricken mothers of her own soldiers.

The Emancipation Proclamation, with which Mr. Lincoln delighted the
country and the world on the first of January, 1863, will doubtless
secure for him a foremost place in history among the philanthropists and
benefactors of the race, as it rescued, from hopeless and degrading
slavery, so many millions of his fellow-beings described in the law and
existing in fact as "chattels-personal, in the hands of their owners and
possessors, to all intents, constructions, and purposes whatsoever."
Rarely does the happy fortune come to one man to render such a service to