“If you can find any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery, whatever else it embraces, say to him he may come to me with you; and that if he really brings such proposition, he shall at the least have safe conduct with the paper (and without publicity if he chooses) to the point where you shall have met him. The same if there be two or more persons.” [Illustration: One of the last photographs of Lincoln. The picture shows plainly the cares of office] After his second election to the Presidency, and while pressing his generals on to the end, Lincoln continued to show how free was his soul from bitterness toward the South. The climax came in his second inaugural speech, when a million soldiers were executing his orders in the field. It was the last, supreme outpouring of his great and gentle soul before peace came in the surrender at Appomattox, to be followed by his own bloody death at the hands of a fanatic. Those who saw him on the day of his second inauguration say that he was thinner and more wrinkled than ever. His face had a ghastly, gray pallor. There was an expression of indescribable mourning in his eyes. After speaking for some time to the crowd there came a strangely beautiful look into his wasted features as he drew himself to his full height and raised his hands high. Then came that matchless outburst which is repeated by hundreds of thousands of American schoolboys every year: “Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.” After he was shot by John Wilkes Booth in Ford’s theater on April 14, 1865, Lincoln never spoke again. He had seen the stars and stripes raised in Richmond. He had seen the end of human slavery on the American continent. The nation was one again. But he was to speak no deathbed message. It was all in that last great speech: “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”