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.