” To explain that reply...

” To explain that reply, Dale Carnegie writes: **“**Four slave States had remained with the North, and Lincoln realised that if he issued his Emancipation Proclamation too early in the conflict he would drive them into the Confederacy, strengthen the South, and perhaps destroy the Union forever. There was a saying at the time that Lincoln would like to have God Almighty on his side, but he must have Kentucky. **“**So he bided his time, and moved cautiously.

**“**He himself had married into a slave-owning, border State family. Part of the money that his wife received from the settlement of her father's estate had come from the sale of slaves. And the only really intimate friend that he ever had, Joshua Speed was a member of a slave-owning family. Lincoln sympathised with the Southern point of view. Besides, he had the attorney's traditional respect for the Constitution and for law and property. He wanted to work no hardship on any one.

**“**He believed that the North was much to blame for the existence of slavery in the United States as was the South; and that in getting rid of it, both sections should bear the burden equally. So he finally worked out a plan that was very near to his heart. According to this, the slave-owners in the loyal border States were to receive four hundred dollars for each of their Negroes. The slaves were to be emancipated gradually, very gradually.

The process was not to be entirely completed until January 1, 1900. Calling the representatives of the border States to the White House, he pleaded with them to accept his proposal. “ The change it contemplates, Lincoln argued, would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything. 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 to lament that you have neglected it. ” The reader would remember that this plan of emancipation “ that was very near his Lincoln's heart ” was the same which had already been effected and practised 1300 years ago in Islam and which had produced wonderful results in the Islamic world.

Had that plan been accepted by Lincoln's compatriots, there would not have been so much racial hatred, internal strife, social upheaval and emotional instability which is still persisting in the USA a century after the so called “ emancipation of Negroes ” there.