only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over
it."
He did not live to weep over it for what he
!
prophesied happened; The tragic rending of a nation in
a civil war over man's inhumanity to man and the disaster
that always follows from it.
And in another period Abraham Lincoln was basica] -
ly honest and willing to admit his confusions but he saw
that the nations could not exist half-slave and half-
free, but yet on occasion he rationalized and responding
to the culture of his time, wrote of the physical
differences between the black and the white, and made it
clear that he felt that there was a racial superiority
by virtue of skin color.
Now, morally Lincoln was against slavery but he
was unable to act in accordance with his conscience be-
cause of the culture in which he lived. And he
said if we could first know whither wo are tending,
we could better judge what to do.
Fortunately for the nation he could see whither
we were tending, and on January I, 1896, he issued the