Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. II.djvu/333

 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 269 if you would, be blind to the signs of the times. I beg of you a calm and enlarged consideration of them, ranging, if it may be, far above personal and partisan politics. This proposal makes common cause for a common object, casting no reproaches upon any. . . . Will you not embrace it ? So much good has not been done, by one effort, in all past time, as in the providence of God it is now your high privilege to do. May the vast future not have cause to lament that you have neglected it.&quot; He had several times endeavored to bring this proposition before the members of congress from the loyal slave-holding states, and on July 12 he invited them to meet him at the executive mansion, and submitted to them a powerful and urgent ap peal to induce their states to adopt the policy of compensated emancipation. He told them, with out reproach or complaint, that he believed that if they had all voted for the resolution in the gradual emancipation message of the preceding March the war would now have been substantially ended, and that the plan therein proposed was still one of the most potent and swift means of ending it. &quot;Let the states,&quot; he said, &quot;which are in rebellion see definitely and certainly that in no event will the states you represent ever join their proposed con federacy, and they cannot much longer maintain the contest.&quot; While urging this policy upon the con servatives, and while resolved in his own mind upon