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 administration 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 over-ruling 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.