He was entering now a new phase of power. His influence over the people was supreme. No man or set of men in Congress, or outside of it, could defeat his policies. Even through the years of stunning defeats and measureless despair his enemies had never successfully opposed a measure on which he had set his heart. His first great work accomplished in destroying slavery and restoring the Union, there remained but two tasks on which his soul was set--to heal the bitterness of the war and remove the negro race from physical contact with the white. He at once addressed himself to this work with enthusiasm. That he could do it he never doubted for a moment. His first care was to remove the negro soldiers from the country as quickly as possible. He summoned General Butler and set him to work on his scheme to use these one hundred and eighty thousand black troops to dig the Panama Canal. He summoned Bradley, the Vermont contractor, and put him to work on estimates for moving the negroes by ship to Africa or by train to an undeveloped Western Territory. His prophetic soul had pierced the future and seen with remorseless logic that two such races as the Negro and Caucasian could not live side by side in a free democracy. The Radical theorists of Congress were demanding that these black men, emerging from four thousand years of slavery and savagery should receive the ballot and the right to claim the white man's daughter in marriage. They could only pass these measures over the dead body of Abraham Lincoln. The assassin came at last--a vain, foolish dreamer who had long breathed the poisoned air of hatred. It needed but the flash of this madman's pistol on the night of the 14th of April to reveal the grandeur of Lincoln's character, the marvel of his patience and his wisdom. The curtains of the box in Ford's theatre were softly drawn apart by an unseen hand. The Angel of Death entered, paused at the sight of the smile on his rugged, kindly face, touched the drooping shoulders, called him to take the place he had won among earth's immortals and left to us "the gentlest memory of our world." THE END