occupied the attention of the country while the formative processes were going on, which matured finally in the opinion that slavery and the Union could no longer co-exist. In the same time the country arrived at the conclusion that separation and continuous peace were impossible. The alternative was this: Slavery, a division of territory, and a condition of permanent hostility on the one side; and on the other, a union of States, domestic peace, a government of imperial power, with equality of citizenship in the States and an equality of States in the Union. Thus his measures, which were at once measures of expediency and of delay, prepared the public mind to receive his monitory Proclamation of September 1862. In that time the border States had come to realize the fact that the negroes were no longer valuable as property, and they therefore accepted emancipation as a means of ending the controversy. To the Republicans of the North, the Proclamation was a welcome message; to the Democrats it was a result which they had predicted, and against which they had in vain protested. But the controversy would not have ended with the war. Slavery existed in the States that had not participated in the rebellion, and the legality of the Emancipation Proclamation might be drawn in question in the courts. One thing more was wanted, an amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery everywhere within the jurisdiction of the Government. This was secured after a protracted struggle, and the result was due in a pre-eminent degree to the personal and official influence of Mr. Lincoln. In one phrase it may be said that every power of his office was exerted to secure the passage, in the Thirty-eighth Congress, of the resolution, by which the proposed amendment was submitted to the States. Mr. Lincoln did not live to see the consummation of his great undertaking, in the cause of Freedom, but the work of ratification by the States was accelerated by his death, and on the 18th day of December, 1865, Mr. Seward, then Secretary of State of the United States, made proclamation that the amendment had been ratified by twenty-seven of the thirty-six States then composing the Union, and that slavery and involuntary servitude were from that time and forever forth impossible within our limits. Such was then the universal opinion in all America. It was our example that wrought the abolition of slavery in Brazil, and in colonies of Spain and Portugal; it has led to the extermination of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and it was an inspiration to the nations of Europe in their effort to destroy the traffic in human beings on the continent of Africa.