ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 121 



and their cardinal principle was disunion, because they were 

 convinced that within the Union the position of slavery 

 was impregnable. In spite of the proverb, great effects 

 do not follow from small causes that is, disproportionately 

 small but from adequate causes acting under certain 

 required conditions. To contrast the size of the oak with 

 that of the parent acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all 

 costs from its slender strong-box, may serve for a child s 

 wonder; but the real miracle lies in that divine league 

 which bound all the forces of nature to the service of the 

 tiny germ in fulfilling its destiny. Everything has been at 

 work for the past ten years in the cause of anti-slavery, but 

 Garrison and Phillips have been far less successful pro 

 pagandists than the slave-holders 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 110 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 favour 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 im 

 minent peril. Then at last the stars in their courses begin 

 to fight against Sisera. Had anyone doubted before that 

 the rights of human nature are unitary, that oppression is 



