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.

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we came out of that struggle; and the money value in the country now
bears even a greater proportion to what it was then, than does the population. Surely each man has as strong a motive now to preserve our
liberties, as each had then to establish them.
A right result, at this time, will be worth more to the world than ten
times the men and ten times the money. The evidence reaching us from
the country leaves no doubt that the material for the work is abundant,
and that it needs only the hand of legislation to give it legal sanction,
and the hand of the Executive to give it practical shape and efficiency.
One of the greatest perplexities of the Government is to avoid receiving
troops faster than it can provide for them. In a word, the people will
save their Government, if the Government itself will do its part only
indifferently well.
It might seem, at first thought, to be of little difference whether the
present movenmeit at the South be called "secession" or "rebellion."
The movers, however, will understand the difference. At the beginning,
they knew they could never raise their treason to any respectable
magnitude by any name which implies violation of law. They knew
their people possessed as much of moral sense, as much of devotion to
law and order, and as much pride in, and reverence for the history and
Government of their common country, as any other civilized and patriotic people. They knew they could make no advancement directly in the
teeth of these strong and noble sentiments. Accordingly, they conmenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind. They invented
an ingenious sophism, which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly
logical steps, through all the incidents, to the complete destruction of
the Union. The sophism itself is, that any State of the Union nmay,
consistently with the National Constitution, and therefore lawfully and
peacefully, withdraw from the Union without the consent of the Union,
or of any other State. The little disguise that the supposed right is to
be exercised only for just cause, themselves to be the sole judges of its
justice, is too thin to merit any notice.
With rebellion thus sugar-coated they have been drugging the public
mind of their section for more than thirty years, and until at length they
have brought many good men to a willingness to take up arms against
the Government the day after some assemblage of men have enacted the
farcical pretence of taking their State out of the Union, who could have
been brought to no such thing the day before.
This sophism derives much, perhaps the whole, of its currency from
the assumption that there is some omnipotent and sacred supremacy
pertaining to a State-to each State of our Federal Union. Our States
have neither more nor less power than that reserved to them in the
Union by the Oonstitution —no one of them ever having been a State out
of the Union. The original ones passed Into the Union even before they
cast off their British colonial dependence; and the new ones each came
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