It will be a matter of interest to many to know that Mr. Lincoln looked very favorably upon a proposal that had been made for the excavation and completion of the Panama Canal by means of the labor of the freedmen. Those close to the President at the time were aware of the fact that he favored the plan, and it was for the purpose of securing the views of Horace Greeley, of the New York _Tribune_, and other molders of public thought, in regard to the plan, that he called Major Merwin to the White House on the fatal Friday, April 14, 1865, the day that he was shot. After the President had explained this business to Mr. Merwin, perhaps recalling again those stirring times ten years before, when he had campaigned with him, he said, "After reconstruction, the next great question will be the overthrow of the liquor traffic." That evening Mr. Merwin was on his way to New York, and the following morning, as he stepped from the train in that city, he heard the terrible news of the assassination at Ford's Theater, the night before. Mr. Merwin says that Mr. Lincoln talked freely with him on the overthrow of the liquor traffic, and it is his strong conviction that if his life had been spared, even a decade, he would have emphasized his lifelong devotion to the temperance cause with an open and decisive championship of State and National prohibition. The slavery issue had come unforeseen into his life and swept him heart and soul into the very vortex of that terrific struggle. As he often expressed it, "there must be one war at a time," and the one that called him first was not of his own choosing in point of order. The abridged address on "Lincoln as a Prohibitionist," delivered by Major Merwin at the Lincoln Monument, at Springfield, Illinois, May 26, 1904, which he furnished for this book, is here given. It was printed in the _New Voice_, Chicago, June 16, 1904, to which I am indebted for a number of the foregoing items, some of which were marked by Major Merwin with a blue pencil. After a brief introduction by Mr. Alonzo Wilson, chairman of the State Prohibition Committee, Mr. Merwin, standing on one of the steps of the stairway of the monument, with a beautiful flag covering a part of the balustrade, said: