If he meant what he said in his famous letter to Alexander H. Stephens, if he meant what he said even in his last inaugural,—to say nothing of the first,—it was never Lincoln’s intention to go farther than to combat the South in her efforts to extend slavery into the free states and territories. In guiding the non-seceding states through the perils of civil strife, Mr. Lincoln’s position was never so difficult as was that of Mazarin, nor that of Richelieu; not so difficult as that of Cromwell; not so difficult as that of William the Silent, or William of Orange, and very much less difficult than that of the younger Pitt,-“the pilot that weathered the storm” of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Mr. Lincoln’s achievements as chief magistrate and as a statesman certainly do not outrank those of George Washington, nor even those of Cavour, to whom modern Italy owes her existence; nor of Bismarck, creator of the German Empire. _Finally, it should be remembered that the South was combating the Spirit of the Age and the Conscience of Mankind._ This fact lightened Mr. Lincoln’s task, immensely. How do the people of the South feel toward Lincoln? Kindly. We honor his memory. We think that he was broad-minded, free from vindictiveness, free from sectionalism, free from class-hatred. We think he was a strong man, a sagacious man, and a very determined man. We have always regarded his assassination as the worst blow the South got after Appomattox. We think that he, alone, could have stemmed the torrent of sectional hatred, and could have worked out a simple plan of restoring the seceding states to the Union which would have reunited the family without that carnival of debauchery and crime known as the “Reconstruction period.” We think that the man who made the appeal to the South which he made in his first inaugural, and the man who at Gettysburg, soon after the battle, praised the courage of the troops who made the effort to storm such heights as those, and who on the night of Lee’s surrender called upon the bands to play “Dixie,” was not a bitter partizan of the Thaddeus Stevens stripe, who, after the guns had been stacked and the flags furled, would have used all of the tremendous and irresistible power of the Federal Government to humiliate, outrage, despoil and drive to desperation a people who were already in the dust. It is not true that Mr. Lincoln offered generous terms to the South at the Hampton Roads Conference. He did not say to the Confederate Commissioners, “Write the word ‘_Union_’ first and you may write whatever you please after that.” It is not true that he offered payment for the slaves. The official reports made to both Governments, as well as Mr. Stephens’ story of the celebrated Conference, conclusively prove that Mr. Lincoln demanded the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy as a preliminary to any discussion of terms.