towards whom he forbade vindictiveness. As if to show that the South is unworthy of pardon, a Southerner assassinates the ruler who on that very day was contending with his Cabinet for the policy of pardon to the South, and who must be succeeded by a man who, avowedly worshipping the people, can scarcely, even to conciliate that people, restrain his own desire for a policy of vengeance. Whatever of vindictiveness is latent in the Northern heart has been supplied at once with an excuse which even the South will not deny, and with the very agent whom vindictiveness in full swing might have prompted the nation to elect. It is the very irony of fate, a calamity for which the single consolation lies in the old expression of a trust to which political faith is mere suspicion, Shall not the Judge of all the world do right?' With the ship barely over the bar the pilot falls dead upon the deck-and it must be well, but the sailors may be pardoned if for the moment they feel as if the harbour would never be attained. It is hard to estimate even the immediate effects of a disaster so great and so unexpected; the consequences are so vast, the data so numerous, that the mind is bewildered by the effort preliminary to calculation. The main datum of all is, however, secured; the law-abiding North rejects the idea of revolution, and intends to accept Mr. Andrew Johnson as its chief magistrate; and that fact once granted, two or three results will, we think, seem to reflecting men almost inevitable:-1. The North has suffered an immense loss of power; 2. The prospect of peace has been weakened, if not materially, still perceptibly; but, 3. The triumph of the great cause itself is as secure as ever."

From the DAILY TELEGRAPH.

"No fouler crime stands chronicled in all history than the murder of Abraham Lincoln, The sorry pleas of State necessity or political interest that have been advanced time out of mind to palliate assassination cannot even be heard with toleration in such a case as this, for the act is one that outrages humanity and shocks the common conscience of the world. It is accursed and supremely infamous; it is

most cowardly, most cruel. Every war has its horrors, and the great fight between the North and South has been no exception to the rule; but there never was anything more atrocious than this-never anything more base than the slaughter of a man who, during years of great_excitement, had scarcely made a single personal enemy. In the agony and crisis that preceded Robespierre's Reign of Terror, Danton said, 'The Revolution, like Saturn, is beginning to devour its own children!' Abraham Lincoln was the child -in no invidious sense, we may even say the puppet-of the passions of his time, and now he has become their victim. A fine spirit of popular enthusiasm made him chief magistrate of the greatest Republic ever known; the ferocity and the madness of a few desperadoes have abruptly ended a career which already loomed so largely. A wonderful life was Lincoln's-a life quite as startling and surprising as his death; but, at any rate, the worst part of his work seemed over. The resistance of the South had been crushed. A sturdy, sensible Western man, with long limbs and a longer head, Mr. Lincoln had worked his way in the world without any dishonourable subterfuges or mean devices. Clear, direct, simple, and straightforward, he had already, during his brief term of office, outlived many suspicions, jealousies, misconstructions, and dislikes. He bore his honours well, and was settling down into a quiet simple dignity of manner, and a kindly moderation of thought and temper. Terrible had been the trial through which he had victoriously passed. He was emphatically one of the people, but his homespun virtues seemed to justify the people's choice. At any rate, he had diligently, faithfully, and not unskilfully, laboured according to such light as was given him; and now, as he seemed to touch the goal, his course is abruptly checked. To-day, all party-feeling, all political jealousies, must be hushed and suspended; to-day, no man is a sympathizer with North or South; we are all mourners over the fate of an honest citizen.

"Abraham Lincoln's life was not particularly happy. He was a sagacious, toilsome, dogged, patient man; he rose by his energy and his shrewdness from a very humble position to the Presidential chair; but the Presidential chair itself was not a luxurious resting-place, and even the strong Kentuckian frame of the man was sorely tried. Mr. Tennyson speaks of the fierce light which beats upon a throne; fiercer yet, even more broad, open, dazzling, and glaring, was that which played so terribly around the President. It has lit up

many noble points in his character, to which, as the years roll on and as party passions fade away, full justice will assuredly be done; but, even viewed in this utter publicity, this sheer nakedness of life, his character stands singularly clear of all that was mean or base. It was easy to caricature his ungainly form, and it was often necessary to dwell upon his mental limitations and defects; his jests were sometimes in bad taste, his language exaggerated and heedless; yet upon everything that he said or did there was the stamp of strong individual manhood. In truth, those who knew him best were convinced that his life was really sad; that his jokes were but the efforts of a jaded, melancholy nature to relieve its sense of weariness; that, knowing he had no time to cry, he laughed as often as he could. Be this said to his honour-whatever cruel things have been done by his subordinates, Abraham Lincoln himself never sent a man to the scaffold. The journalists of his own country have not spared him; yet, after all, the sum of their accusations was also the basis of his glory. Abraham Lincoln, who had been a 'rail-splitter' and then a village lawyer,' contrived by shrewd mother-wit and robust integrity of character to win the esteem of the stout men of the West—a nobler type of Americanism than the motley tribes of New York; whilst at last he became the foremost man in the greatest Republic in the world at the hour of its supremest need. His acts are on record—they fill a large volume; and whoever may study them as a part of history, not as material for party polemics, they will prove, upon the whole, singularly sagacious and astute. It has often been our lot to blame themoften been our lot to question the wisdom of the policy which he pursued; nor do we retract what we have said, even now that we have to review it so solemnly and sadly. From factious hatred, from meanness, jealousy, uncharitableness, this ruler was nobly free. The strange grim face, that was yet illuminated so often by a gleam of honest humour.or a glance of genuine kindliness, has been quietly covered by the sere-cloth; the almost gigantic frame, lifeless and limp, has been coffined and palled. He had given the Republic all he had-his time, his peace, his reputation, his children. One son, his eldest, he had to the front with General Grant; another he lost while the war was raging; and yet the officeseekers would not give him an hour's rest, but almost tortured him into madness by their importunities. Throughout the dreariest time of national reverses and calamity, he never despaired. Almost solemn now are those well

remembered familiar phrases, 'I have put my foot down,' and 'We must keep pegging away.' They were but rough translations of a sentiment which, expressed in more knightly phrase, we should regard as heroical. And at last came what seemed to be the fruition of his labours, the reward of his patience and his courage. He, the man of Kentucky and Illinois, entered Richmond as a conqueror; but he launched no decree of proscription; for the fight appeared over, and it was not in the man's large heart to bear malice against a beaten foe. 'He spoke very kindly of Lee,' said Stanton; and on the night of that memorable council, where he pleaded for peace and for mercy, a villain killed him. Not for Lincoln himself can the end be considered as unhappy. To the extent of his power he has done his duty, with singleness of heart, with honesty of purpose; and if ever man nceded rest, he needed it. That rest he has obtained, and, with it, the reward that follows honest service."

From the SCOTSMAN.

"This one man held in his hands the destinies of two nations—once forming one people, of late seeming likely once again to form one people, but which had for a time become magnificent fragments, and could not be combined anew without the exercise of rare delicacy and immense power. The long dreary conflict seemed near its close; the waste of the best lives and of all the best possessions of a mighty people seemed about to end. The labour of this man was not now any longer to lie in the ensanguined fields of war, into which his stern love of an idea the idea of the Union-and his inflexible pursuance of what he held to be the path of duty, had led him. Henceforth his more kindly and, we are willing to believe, more congenial task was to be, the healing of the hurts of war-the winning back, into his own ways, of those who had turned, in his judgment, into mistaken and wrongful ways. To that task, delicate and arduous, he was about to apply himself with all his skill and all his heart. The moment of the crowning test of Mr. Lincoln was at hand. All the omens might be read as promising that Mr. Lincoln would stand that test as his best friends could most desire, and so that even his enemies must fail to be reasonably dissatisfied. At the sorest need of the conquered South and the perplexed North, the man of will, of energy, of clear vision and unswerving course, has vanished. What will follow, no man knows. This, how

ever, all know-that the good thing which might but yesterday have been hopefully expected, may now fail to be given us; and that we have now greater cause than but a day ago we had, for fearing what we had all but ceased to fear. There is enough of depth, and honesty, and capacity for noble anger and generous sorrow, in the character of the Americans (they are too closely kin with ourselves that we should not be quick to believe it) to make it not impossible that the blood of Mr. Lincoln may be the cement of a new Union."

From the MORNING POST.

"The startling intelligence which has reached us from America will excite but one sentiment in the minds of all, no matter what their political predilections. Northerner and Southerner, European and American, slaveholder and abolitionist, must equally concur in reprobating the dastardly crime which has just been consummated. The President of the United States of America has, in the moment of what he at least considered to be victory, and at the very instant when he had reason to believe that the gigantic enterprize to which he devoted himself was on the point of being crowned with success, fallen by the hand of an assassin. The event is so astounding that it is with difficulty we can bring ourselves to realize its occurrence, much less to estimate its consequences. It is but a few short days since the great and crowning events of the civil war took place, since Richmond was evacuated, and the army of Virginia laid down its arms, and since Mr. Lincoln, boasting once more to be not only de jure, but de facto President of the entire American Republic, proclaimed it to the civilized world, and appointed a day of general thanksgiving to inaugurate the commencement of a new and happier era. On Sunday, the 9th of the present month, General Lee capitulated; on the following day Mr. Lincoln congratulated his fellow-citizens on the happy issue of the arduous struggle in which they had been so long engaged, and besought their co-operation in that no less arduous work of reconstruction to which he purposed devoting the second period of his official career and on the Friday following he was brutally murdered. In the annals of history there are to be found but too many instances in which the chief magistrate of a State has fallen by the assassin's hand, but we doubt if there is one which, by its surrounding circumstances, will retain a deeper hold