The Proclamation of Freedom by President Lincoln is doubtless open to criticism. Why did he not declare all slaves emancipated? Why not make such legal manumission operative at once? Why intimate that certain States should (or might) be excepted from its operation? Why not declare the slaves liberated because of the essential, inevitable wrong of holding them in bondage? Why not appeal to God for His blessing on the cause henceforward inseparably identified with that of Right and Liberty? Such questions may be multiplied indefinitely; but to what end? What matters that the Proclamation might or should be different, since we have practical concern only with the Proclamation as it is? For more than a lifetime, slavery has been accepted and regarded as a national institution. The American in Europe was "perplexed in the extreme" by the questionings and criticisms of humane, intelligent observers, who could not comprehend how a country should contain Four Millions of slaves by the official census, yet not be a slaveholding country. With our capital a slaveholding city; with our fortresses in good part constructed by the labor of slaves; with our flag the chief shelter of the African Slave Trade, and our statute book disgraced by the most arbitrary and inhuman Fugitive Slave Law ever devised, it _was_ a nice operation to prove this no slaveholding country, but only one wherein certain citizens, by virtue of local laws, over which we had no control, were permitted to hold Blacks in slavery. And, when it is notorious that the active partisans of slavery filled every Federal office, even in the nominally free States, and excluded rigorously from office every opponent of the baleful system, it is certain that the shrug of the polite Frenchman who listened to our demonstration that ours, after all, was not a slaveholding country, was an indication of complaisance rather than of conviction. To prove this nothing of the sort, while Brazil was placed at the head of modern slaveholding countries, was to overtax the resources of human sophistry. The Proclamation is an immense fact. If it were no more than a recognition from the highest quarter of the deadly antagonism between slavery and the Union, it would have inexhaustible significance. The American republic, bleeding at every pore while fighting desperately for life, arraigns slavery as her chief enemy and peril. The truth was long since clear to every candid mind; but truth gains force by recognition. Thousands realize a fact thus proclaimed, who have hitherto ignored and resisted it. For thirty years, the charge of disloyalty has borne heavily on the American champion of Universal Liberty. True, as to a very few, who could not obtain the assent of their consciences to compacts which bound them to aid the oppressor against his victim, they were made a weapon of offense against all. Abolitionists were execrated and hooted by the mob as champions at once of Negro Equality and of National dissolution.