Life of Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United StatesCrosby, Frank
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Life of Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United States
Crosby, Frank
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865
“The proposed emancipation would shorten the war, perpetuate peace,
insure this increase of population, and proportionately the wealth
of the country. With these, we should pay all the emancipation
would cost, together with our other debt, easier than we should
pay our other debt, without it. If we had allowed our old National
debt to run at six per cent. per annum, simple interest, from the
end of our Revolutionary struggle until to-day, without paying any
thing on either principal or interest, each man of us would owe
less upon that debt now, than each man owed upon it then; and this
because our increase of men, through the whole period, has been
greater than six per cent.; has run faster than the interest upon
the debt. Thus, time alone relieves a debtor nation, so long as its
population increases faster than unpaid interest accumulates on its
debt.
“This fact would be no excuse for delaying payment of what is
justly due; but it shows the great importance of time in this
connection--the great advantage of a policy by which we shall
not have to pay until we number a hundred millions, what, by a
different policy, we would have to pay now, when we number but
thirty-one millions. In a word, it shows that a dollar will be much
harder to pay for the war, than will be a dollar for emancipation
on the proposed plan. And then the latter will cost no blood, no
precious life. It will be a saving of both.
“As to the second article, I think it would be impracticable to
return to bondage the class of persons therein contemplated. Some
of them, doubtless, in the property sense, belong to loyal owners;
and hence, provision is made in this article for compensating such.
“The third article relates to the future of the freed people.
It does not oblige, but merely authorizes, Congress to aid in
colonizing such as may consent. This ought not to be regarded as
objectionable, on the one hand, or on the other, in so much as it
comes to nothing, unless by the mutual consent of the people to be
deported, and the American voters, through their representatives in
Congress.
“I can not make it better known than it already is, that I strongly
favor colonization. And yet I wish to say there is an objection
urged against free colored persons remaining in the country, which
is largely imaginary, if not sometimes malicious.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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