Abraham Lincoln
Page: 21

slaveholders themselves, with the constantly growing arrogance of
their pretensions and encroachments. They have forced the
question upon the attention of every voter in the Free States, by
defiantly putting freedom and democracy on the defensive. But,
even after the Kansas outrages, there was no wide-spread desire on
the part of the North to commit aggressions, though there was a
growing determination to resist them. The popular unanimity in
favor of the war three years ago was but in small measure the result
of anti-slavery sentiment, far less of any zeal for abolition. But
every month of the war, every movement of the allies of slavery in
the Free States, has been making Abolitionists by the thousand.
The masses of any people, however intelligent, are very little moved
by abstract principles of humanity and justice, until those principles
are interpreted for them by the stinging commentary of some
infringement upon their own rights, and then their instincts and
passions, once aroused, do indeed derive an incalculable
reinforcement of impulse and intensity from those higher ideas,
those sublime traditions, which have no motive political force till
they are allied with a sense of immediate personal wrong or
imminent peril. Then at last the stars in their courses begin to fight
against Sisera. Had any one doubted before that the rights of
human nature are unitary, that oppression is of one hue the world
over, no matter what the color of the oppressed,--had any one
failed to see what the real essence of the contest was,--the efforts of
the advocates of slavery among ourselves to throw discredit upon
the fundamental axioms of the Declaration of Independence and the
radical doctrines of Christianity, could not fail to sharpen his eyes.

(1) A Danish antiquary and theologian.

While every day was bringing the people nearer to the conclusion
which all thinking men saw to be inevitable from the beginning, it
was wise in Mr. Lincoln to leave the shaping of his policy to events.
In this country, where the rough and ready understanding of the
people is sure at last to be the controlling power, a profound