It may be well here, without waiting to trace further the course of the war, in which at the point where we left it the slow but irresistible progress of conquest was about to set in, to recount briefly the later stages of the abolition of slavery in America. In 1863 it became apparent that popular feeling in Missouri and in Maryland was getting ripe for abolition. Bills were introduced into Congress to compensate their States if they did away with slavery; the compensation was to be larger if the abolition was immediate and not gradual. There was a majority in each House for these Bills, but the Democratic minority was able to kill them in the House of Representatives by the methods of "filibustering," or, as we call it, obstruction, to which the procedure of that body seems well adapted. The Republican majority had not been very zealous for the Bills; its members asked "why compensate for a wrong" which they had begun to feel would soon be abolished without compensation; but their leaders at least did their best for the Bills. It would have been idle after the failure of these proposals to introduce the Bills that had been contemplated for buying out the loyal slave owners in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, which was now fast being regained for the Union. Lincoln after his Message of December, 1862, recognised it as useless for him to press again the principles of gradual emancipation or of compensation, as to which it is worth remembrance that the compensation which he proposed was for loyal and disloyal owners alike. His Administration, however, bought every suitable slave in Delaware for service (service as a free man) in the Army. In the course of 1864 a remarkable development of public opinion began to be manifest in the States chiefly concerned. In the autumn of that year Maryland, whose representatives had paid so little attention to Lincoln two years before, passed an Amendment to the State Constitution abolishing slavery without compensation. A movement in the same direction was felt to be making progress in Kentucky and Tennessee; and Missouri followed Maryland's example in January, 1865. Meanwhile, Louisiana had been reconquered, and the Unionists in these States, constantly encouraged and protected by Lincoln when Congress looked upon them somewhat coldly or his generals showed jealousy of their action, had banded themselves together to form State Governments with Constitutions that forbade slavery. Lincoln, it may be noted, had suggested to Louisiana that it would be well to frame some plan by which the best educated of the negroes should be admitted to the franchise. Four years after his death a Constitutional Amendment was passed by which any distinction as to franchise on the ground of race or colour is forbidden in America. The policy of giving the vote to negroes indiscriminately had commended itself to the cold pedantry of some persons, including Chase, on the ground of some natural right of