Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war r
ather than let it perish. From the context of this sentence from the passage, which pair of words are antonyms?
a) both and them B) war and nation C) survive and perish D) deprecated and accept
The sentence is drawing a parallel between the two parties' reasons for going to war. Each of them is associated with a verb: one with "survive," the other with "perish." They are the two antonyms.
Antonyms are words which have opposite meanings. <em>Survive </em>means to contine living, and <em>perish </em>means to stop living.
What Lincoln meant by using this antonym-based parallelism is that the Confederacy fought to end the exisiting nation (meaning, to secede from the North and create a new nation), while the Union fought to keep the nation alive by preventing it from splitting.
