The life and public services of Abraham Lincoln ... together with his state papers, including his speeches, addresses, messages, letters, and proclamations, and the closing scenes connected with his life and death. By Henry J. Raymond. To which are added anecdotes and personal reminiscences of President Lincoln, by Frank B. Carpenter.

STATE PAPERS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 169
have, with equal wisdom, provided for the return of that little to their
own hands at very short intervals. While the people retain their virtue
and vigilance, no Administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly,
can very seriously injure the Government in the short space of four
years.
My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole
subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time. If there be an
object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never
take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time; but no
good object can be frustrated by it. Such of you as are now dissatisfied,
still have the old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point,
the laws of your own framing under it; wliile the new Administration
will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either. If it nwere
admitted that you who are dissatisfied hold the right side in the dispute,
there still is no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence,
patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Iim who has never yet
forsaken this favored land, are still competent to adjust, in the best way,
all our present difficulty.
In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is
the momentous issues of civil war. The Government will not assail you.
You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.
You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government;
while I shall have the most solemn one to " preserve, protect, and de
fend " it.
I am loth to close. We are no-t enemies, but friends. We must not be
enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break,ur bonds
of affection.
The mystic cord of memory, stretching from every battle-ield and
patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over thlis broad
land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as
surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
The declarations of the Inaugural, as a gen-eral thing,
gave satisfaction to the loyal people of the whole country. It was seen, everywhere, that while President Lincoln felt constrained, by the most solemn obligations
of duty, to maintain the authority of the Government of
the United States over all the territory within its jurisdiction, whenever that authority should be disputed by
the actual exercise of armed force, he would nevertheless
do nothing whatever to provoke such a demonstration,
and would take no step which could look like violence or
offensive warfare upon the seceded States. In the Border
States its reception was in the main satisfactory. But, as