case the fact that the proclamation was determined upon and issued at the sole will and discretion of the President is not shaken by any testimony that is given about it. He regarded it as a most grave measure, as plainly it was; to a Southerner, who had begged him not to have recourse to it, he replied: "You must not expect me to give up this government without playing my last card."[38] So now, on this momentous twenty-second day of September, the President, using his own judgment in playing the great game, cast what he conceived to be his ace of trumps upon the table. The measure took the country by surprise. The President's secret had been well kept, and for once rumor had not forerun execution. Doubtless the reader expects now to hear that one immediate effect was the conciliation of all those who had been so long reproaching Mr. Lincoln for his delay in taking this step. It would seem right and natural that the emancipationists should have rallied with generous ardor to sustain him. They did not. They remained just as dissatisfied and distrustful towards him as ever. Some said that he had been _forced_ into this policy, some that he had drifted with the tide of events, some that he had waited for popular opinion at the North to give him the cue, instead of himself guiding that opinion. To show that he was false to the responsibility of a ruler, there were those who cited against him his own modest words: "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." Others, however, put upon this language the more kindly and more honest interpretation, that Mr. Lincoln appreciated that both President and people were moved by the drift of events, which in turn received their own impulse from an agency higher than human and to which they must obediently yield. But whatever ingenious excuses were devised by extremists for condemning the man who had done the act, the Republican party faithfully supported the act itself. In the middle of December the House passed a resolution ratifying the President's policy as "well adapted to hasten the restoration of peace," and "well chosen as a war measure."