ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



1864. 



have been many painful crises since the im- 

 -L patient vanity of South Carolina hurried ten pros 

 perous Commonwealths into a crime whose assured ret 

 ribution was to leave them either at the mercy of the 

 nation they had wronged, or of the anarchy they had 

 summoned but could not control, when no thoughtful 

 American opened his morning paper without dreading to 

 find that he had no longer a country to love and honor. 

 Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks 

 were beginning to be felt, there would still be enough 

 square miles of earth for elbow-room ; but that ineffable 

 sentiment made up of memory and hope, of instinct and 

 tradition, which swells every man's heart and shapes his 

 thought, though perhaps never present to his conscious 

 ness, would be gone from it, leaving it common earth 

 and nothing more. Men might gather rich crops from 

 it, but that ideal harvest of priceless associations would 

 be reaped no longer ; that fine virtue which sent up 

 messages of courage and security from every sod of 

 it would have evaporated beyond recall. We should be 

 irrevocably cut off from our past, and be forced to splice 

 the ragged ends of our lives upon whatever new con 

 ditions chance might leave dangling for us. 



We confess that we had our doubts at first whether 

 the patriotism of our people were not too narrowly pro 

 vincial to embrace the proportions of national peril. 



