I know very well that many others might, in this matter as in others, do better than I can; and if I was satisfied that the public confidence was more fully possessed by any one of them than by me, and knew of any constitutional way in which he could be put in my place, he should have it. I would gladly yield it to him. But though I believe that I have not so much of the confidence of the people as I had some time since, I do not know that, all things considered, any other person has more; and however this may be, there is no way in which I can have any other man put where I am. I am here; I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.'"--WARDEN: _Life of S. P. Chase_, pp. 481-82, quoted in Nicolay and Hay, VI, 159-60. In the diaries of Secretaries Welles and Chase we have incontrovertible testimony. The two records were made independently and on that very night, and were not published for years afterward. There was no possible collusion or reshaping of the testimony in the light of subsequent events, no time for imagination to play any part in enlarging upon the incident. The President recognized that the time was not wholly propitious, that a majority of the Cabinet probably would not be disposed to adopt his Proclamation if put to vote, that the people's support of the administration was wavering and unpredicable and none too certain to approve this measure. Under these conditions it is impossible to consider the Emancipation Proclamation solely from the standpoint either of political expediency or of military necessity. The fact which silenced all opposition in the Cabinet was the President's solemn statement that he had made a covenant with God, and that he must keep it. There is a sense in which the solemnity is heightened by the grotesque incident of the chapter from Artemus Ward read at the beginning. There is an aspect in which the sublimity of that Cabinet meeting's ending is heightened by the ridiculousness of its beginning. In any event, it shows that the mind of Abraham Lincoln that morning was in what for him was a thoroughly healthy condition. However incongruous it might have been for another man to begin so solemn a meeting with a chapter from Artemus Ward, it was a mark of sanity, of thorough normal psychology, when done by Abraham Lincoln. It showed that the moral overstrain was finding its relief from excessive tension in what for Lincoln was an entirely normal way.