He recognized, however, amid the excitement of the times with all his old-time clarity of vision the constitutional limitations of the Reform. He did not propose at this stage of the struggle to touch slavery within the states, because Congress had not the power. To the utmost verge of the Constitution be pushed his uncompromising opposition to it. Here he drew up his forces, ready to cross the Rubicon of the slave-power whenever justificatory cause arose. Such he considered to be the uprising of the South in rebellion. Rebellion with him cancelled the slave covenants of the Constitution and discharged the North from their further observance. He was at last untrammelled by constitutional conditions and limitations, was free to carry the War into Africa. "Carthago est delenda" was thenceforth ever on his lips. Mr. Lincoln and the Republican party started out to save the Union with slavery. It is the rage now, I know, to extol his marvellous sagacity and statesmanship. And I too will join in the panegyric of his great qualities. But here he was not infallible. For when he issued his Emancipation Proclamation, the South too was weighing the military necessity of a similar measure. Justice was Sumner's solitary expedient, right his unfailing sagacity. Of no other American statesman can they be so unqualifiedly affirmed. They are indeed his peculiar distinction and glory. Here he is the transcendent figure in our political history. And yet, he was no fanatical visionary, Utopian dreamer, but a practical moralist in the domain of politics. When president and party turned a deaf ear to him and his simple straightforward remedy to try their own, he did not break with them. On the contrary foot to foot and shoulder to shoulder he kept step with both as far as they went. Where they halted he would not stop. Stuck as the wheels of State were, during those dreadful years in the mire and clay of political expediency and pro-slavery Hunkerism, he appealed confidently to that large, unknown quantity of courage and righteousness, dormant in the North, to set the balked wheels again moving. An ardent Peace advocate, he nevertheless threw himself enthusiastically into the uprising against the Disunionist. Not to fight then he saw was but to provoke more horrible woes, to prevent which the man of Peace preached war, unrelenting war. He was Anglo-Saxon enough, Puritan and student of history enough to be sensible of the efficacy of blood and iron, at times, in the cure of intolerable ills. But his was no vulgar war for the mere ascendancy of his section in the Union. It was rather a holy crusade against wrong and for the supremacy and perpetuity of liberty in America.