a prominent Vermonter, to come to Washington. He was at my office the morning after I sent the telegram to him. I declined to give him any hint of the purpose of my invitation, but took him directly to the President. When I presented him I said: 'Here, Mr President, is the contractor whom I named to you yesterday.'

"I left them together. Two hours later Mr Bradley returned to my office overflowing with admiration for the President and enthusiasm for his proposed work. 'The proposition is,' he said, 'to remove the whole coloured race into Texas, there to establish a republic of their own. The subject has political bearings of which I am no judge, and upon which the President has not yet made up his mind, but I have shown him that it is practicable. I will undertake to remove them all within a year.'"

He never gave up hope of the colonization of the Negro. After the 13th Amendment giving constitutional freedom to all the Negroes had been passed, he called in General Butler and discussed with him a plan of exporting the coloured soldiers to some foreign land, in Liberia, South America or Demerara.

"General Butler,' he said, 'I am troubled about the negroes. We are soon to have peace. We have got some one hundred and odd thousand negroes who have been trained to arms. When peace shall come I fear lest these coloured men shall organize themselves in the South, especially in the States where the negroes are in preponderance in numbers, into guerilla parties, and we shall have down there a warfare between the whites and the negroes. In the course of the reconstruction of the Government it will become a question of how the negro is to be disposed of. Would it not be possible to export them to some place, say Liberia, or South America, and organize them into communities to support themselves? Now, General, I wish you would examine the practicability of such exportation. Your

organization of the flotilla which carried your army from Yorktown and Fort Monroe to City Point, and its success, show that you understand such matters. Will you give this your attention, and at as early a date as possible report to me your views upon the subject.' I replied, 'Willingly,' and bowed and retired. After some few days of examination, with the aid of statistics and calculations, of this topic, I repaired to the President's office in the morning, and said to him: I have come to report to you on the question you have submitted to me, Mr President, about the exportation of the negroes.' He exhibited great interest, and said: 'Well, what do you think of it?' I said: Mr President, I assume that if the negro is to be sent away on shipboard you do not propose to enact the horrors of the middle passage, but would give the negroes the air-space that the law provides for emigrants.' He said, 'Certainly.' "Well, then, here are some calculations which will show you that if you undertake to export all the negroes and I do not see how you can take one portion differently from another-negro children will be born faster than your whole naval and merchant vessels, if substantially all of them were devoted to that use, can carry them from the country: especially as I believe that their increase will be much greater in a state of freedom than of slavery, because the commingling of the two races does not tend to productiveness.' He examined my tables carefully for some considerable time, and then he looked up sadly and said: 'Your deductions seem to be correct, General. But what can we do?' I replied: 'If I understand you, Mr President, your theory is this: That the negro soldiers we have enlisted will not return to the peaceful pursuits of labouring men, but will become a class of guerillas and criminals. Now, while I do not see, under the Constitution, even with all the aid of Congress, how you can export a class of people who are citizens against their will, yet the Commander-in-Chief can dispose of soldiers quite arbitrarily.

Now, then, we have large quantities of clothing to clothe them, large quantities of provisions with which to supply them, and arms and everything necessary for them, even to spades and shovels, mules and waggons. Our war has shown that an army organization is the very best for digging up the soil and making intrenchments. Witness the very many miles of intrenchments that our soldiers have dug out. I know of a concession of the United States of Colombia for a tract of thirty miles wide across the Isthmus of Panama for opening a ship canal. The enlistments of the negroes have all of them from two to three years to run. Why not send them all down there to dig the canal? They will withstand the climate, and the work can be done with less cost to the United States in that way than in any other. If you choose I will take command of the expedition. We will take our arms with us, and I need not suggest to you that we will need nobody sent down to guard us from the interference of any nation. We will proceed to cultivate the land and supply ourselves with all the fresh food that can be raised in the tropics, which will be all that will be needed, and your stores of provisions and supplies of clothing will furnish all the rest. Shall I work out the details of such an expedition for you, Mr President?' He reflected for some time, and then said: 'There is meat in that suggestion, General Butler; there is meat in that suggestion. Go and talk to Seward, and see what foreign complication there will be about it. Then think it over, get your figures made, and come to me again as soon as you can. If the plan has no other merit, it will rid the country of the coloured soldiers.'"

The death of Lincoln, coming soon after, of course dis

✓turbed this plan to rid the country of the coloured soldiers.

Far from being discouraged by his failure to receive a response from Congress on the question of compensation, he planned a still greater request two months

before the end of the war. This was that Congress empower the President to pay $400,000,000 to the respective slave states in proportion to their slave population in 1860.

His Cabinet unanimously vetoed the document, and folding it up with a sigh, he put it away, but not without a secret hope that he would be able to use it in the near future.

He was of his time and above his time. Walt Whitman said of him: "The invisible foundations and vertebræ of his character, more than any man's in history, were mystical, abstract, moral and spiritual -while upon all of them was built and out of all of them radiated, under the control of the average of circumstances, what the vulgar call horse-sense, and a life often bent by temporary but most urgent materialistic and political reasons."

If there was inconsistency in his nature the fault was America's, not his. The representative of a people cloaked in mystic words of freedom, which were only used to cover their property not themselves, it is no wonder that he almost despaired that any human justice could prevail that did not bring immediate material profit. Tentatively, and as a private suggestion, he wrote to the Governor of Louisiana that perhaps it were well to admit some of the coloured people for an elective franchise, as, for instance, the very intelligent and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help in some trying time to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom."

Slowly his demands grew with the needs. In the

Amnesty Proclamation he promised that the National Executive would not object " if the states would recognize and declare their (the Negroes') permanent freedom and provide for their education, which may yet be consistent as a temporary arrangement with their present condition as a labouring, landless and homeless class."

That was his solution, if the Negro had to remain side by side with his former master-education and a qualified franchise. He had little hope that it would be accorded in the right spirit, he had little hope that the Negro would be ever permitted to rise out of his condition as a "labouring, landless and homeless class." If only some strange land would hold him!

And yet Frederick Douglass, the Negro orator and writer, himself born a slave, tells us that never did he meet a man more free from race prejudice—the first man in all his life in America who talked with him and who, in no single instance, reminded him of the difference between them-the difference in colour.

That is the Lincoln without public policies, the man Lincoln speaking to his neighbour, and no man was more at one with his neighbour than he. Even Douglass saw it. "While I felt I was in the presence of a great man," he said, "as great as the greatest, I felt as though I could go and put my hand on him if I wanted to, to put my hand on his shoulder."

"Dear to Democracy, to the very last!" cried Walt Whitman. True, he followed her "faltering dictates to the very last. Had she learned to ask more, that veil of melancholy would have lifted from his face, and he would have learned, apt pupil that he was, to give more quickly of the largess of his nature.