At last, after this long, weary, heart-breaking delay, he publishes, September 25, “The Proclamation” of the President announcing “that on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State, or any designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be thenceforward and for ever free.” Mr. Beecher says of it: “We send forth to-day the most important paper ever published in the _Independent_, the most extraordinary document ever proceeding from this government.... “No more guises and veils. No more side-issues. No more deceitful compromises. The government has taken ground, and every man in the nation must take ground. You are for or against this government, and this government is declared to mean liberty to the slave! There is no neutral ground for traitors to hide in, playing wolf at night and sheep by day. The President’s proclamation will sift the North, give unity to its people, simplicity to its policy, liberty to its army! That whole army is no longer a mongrel something between a police force and a political caucus. It is an _army_ organized to strike where blows will be most felt. “The Proclamation emancipates slaves in thrice thirty days. But it emancipates the government and the army to-day. The nation is freer than it was on the 21st. We have a policy. The people will base it upon a principle. It is the policy of liberty upon the principle of justice. The future is before us! Through what dark days we must pass we know not. What battles and what reverses are in store we do not inquire. At last we have a right to believe that God is leading us. He who carried His people from bondage through the wilderness, and established them in the promised land, can surely guide us! “Let sorrows fall fast; there is joy before us! We behold upon the troubled sea a Christ coming to us, walking on the waves! In His hand are winds and storms. Every hour now moves toward the great day of Emancipation. At length the dawn shall bring that day most eminent in our national calendar. Amid all the festivities that usher in the year, there shall be a great joy, deeper, purer, holier than ever came to us with the New Year—the joy of a nation that, after long sorrow and shame, shall cast off from itself the guilt of slavery, and stand erect before the world a consistent witness for liberty!” He looks upon it as the beginning of the end, and is satisfied if it be God’s will that his work should now cease. On the evening of the last day of slavery in America—Wednesday evening, December 31—he says in his lecture-room talk: