On the one hand, he was not, like some of our chief magistrates, under the impression that he had been placed in office to carry out irresponsibly a personal policy of his own; and, on the other, he was shrewd enough to know that it would be as futile for a President to place himself far in advance of his people on a great question, as for a general to precede his troops on the battlefield. Hence he turned over and over, and presented again and again, the idea that the war might be stopped and the question settled by paying for the slaves and liberating them. It looked like a very simple calculation to figure out the cost of purchased emancipation and compare it with the probable cost of the war. The comparison seemed to present an unanswerable argument, and in the end the money cost of the war was more than one thousand dollars for every slave emancipated, while in the most profitable days of the institution the blacks, young and old together, had not been worth half that price. The fallacy of the argument lay in its blindness to the fact that the Confederates were not fighting to retain possession of their actual slaves, but to perpetuate the institution itself. The unthrift of slavery as an economic system had been many times demonstrated, notably in Helper's "Impending Crisis," but these demonstrations, instead of inducing the slaveholders to seek to get rid of it on the best attainable terms, appeared only to excite their anger. And it ought to have been seen that a proud people with arms in their hands, either flushed with victory or confident in their own prowess, no matter where their real interests may lie, can never be reasoned with except through the syllogisms of lead and steel. Perhaps Mr. Lincoln did know it, but was waiting for his people to find it out. [Illustration: JOHN BROWN.] The Louisville (Ky.) _Courier_, in a paragraph quoted on page 63 of this volume, had told a great deal of bitter and shameful truth; but when it entered upon the prophecy that the North would soon resume the yoke of the slaveholders, it was not so happy. And yet it had strong grounds for its confident prediction. Not only had a great Peace Convention been held in February, 1861, which strove to prevent secession by offering new guaranties for the protection of slavery, but the chief anxiety of a large number of Northern citizens and officers in the military service appeared to be to manifest their desire that the institution should not be harmed.