“Mr. Vance, you eager philanthropists little know how hard it often is for less impulsive and more conservative men to withstand the urgency of those feelings that you give way to at once. But you have read history to little purpose if you do not know that the best cause may be jeoparded by the premature and too radical movements of its friends. I have been blamed for listening to the counsels of Kentucky politicians and Missouri conservatives; and yet if we had not held back Kentucky from the secession madness, she might have contributed the straw that would have broken the camel’s back.” “O Kentucky!” exclaimed Vance, “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold or hot. So then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth! Mr. President, the ruling powers in Kentucky would hand her over bound to Jeff Davis to-morrow, _if they dared_; but they dare not do it. In the first place, they fear Uncle Sam and his gunboats; in the next place, they fear Kentuckians, of whom, thank God! there are enough who do not believe in slavery; and, lastly, they fear the nineteenth century and the spirit of the age. Better take counsel from the Rhetts and Spratts of South Carolina than from the selfish politicians of Kentucky! They will moor you to the platform of a false conservatism till the golden opportunity slips by, and new thousands must be slaughtered before it can be recovered.” “Well, what would be your programme?” “This, Mr. President: accept it as a foregone conclusion that slavery _must_ be exterminated; and then bend all your energies on accelerating its extermination. We sometimes hear it said, ‘What! do you expect such a vast system—so interwoven with the institutions of the South—to be uprooted and overthrown all at once?’ To which I reply, ‘Yes! _The price paid has been already proportionate to the magnitude of the overthrow._’ Before the war is over, upwards of a million of men will have lost their lives in order that Slavery might try its experiment of establishing an independent slave empire. A million of men! And there are not four millions of slaves in the country! We will not take into account the treasure expended,—the lands desolated,—the taxes heaped upon the people,—the ruin and anguish inflicted. It strikes me the price we have paid is big enough to offset the vastness of the social change. And, after all, it is not such a formidable job when you consider that there are not forty thousand men in the whole country who severally own as many as ten slaves. Why, in a single campaign we lose more soldiers than there are slaveholders having any considerable stake in the institution. Experience has proved that there could be universal emancipation to-morrow without bad results to either master or slave,—with advantage, on the contrary, to both.”[36]