You LINCOLN: "VALIANT-FOR-TRUTH" HON. HENRY CABOT LODGE OU have asked me to address you upon this, the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln; to express for you and to you some of the thoughts which ought to find utterance when, on the completion of the century, we seek to pay fit homage to the memory of that great man. I know not how it may be with the many others, who, in these days of commemoration, will speak of Lincoln, but to me the dominant feeling, as I approach my subject, is a sense of helplessness, and a sharp realization of the impossibility of doing justice to such an occasion. To attempt here a review of his life would be labor lost. Ten stately volumes by those who lived in closest communion with him, and who knew him best, were not more than adequate to tell fitly the story of his life. That story, too, in varying form, is known to all the people, "familiar in their mouths as household words." From the early days of dire poverty, from the log cabin of the shiftless pioneer, ever moving forward in search of a fortune which never came, from the picture of the boy working his sums, or reading his Bible and his Milton by the red light of the fire, the marvellous tale goes onward and upward to the solemn scene of the second inaugural, and to the burial of the great chief amid the lamentations of a nation. We know it all, and the story is one of the great treasures of the American people. Still more impossible would it be in a brief moment here to draw, even in the barest outline, a sketch of the events in which his was the commanding presence, for that would be to write the history of the United States during the most crowded and most terrible years of our existence as a nation. Yet if Lincoln's life and deeds, by their very magnitude, thus exclude us from any attempt even to enumerate them, there is, nevertheless, something still better which we can do upon this day, forever made memorable by his birth. We can render to him what I venture to think is the truest homage, that which I believe he would prize most, and compared to which any other is little more than lip service. We can pause to-day in the hurry of daily life and contemplate that great, lonely, tragic figure-that imagination with its touch of the poet, that keen, strong mind, with its humor and its pathos, that splendid common sense and pure character-and then learn from the life which the possessor of all these qualities lived, and from the deeds which he did, lessons which may not be without value to each one of us in our own lives, in teaching us the service which we should render to our country. Let me express my meaning, with slight variation, in his own immortal words: The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what [he] did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which he who fought here has thus far so nobly advanced. In his spirit, I am about to suggest a few thoughts among the many which have come to me as I have meditated upon the life of Abraham Lincoln, and upon what, with that great theme before me, I should say to you to-day. I desire first, if I can, to take you back for a moment to the living man, and thereby show you what some of his trials were, and how he met them, for, in doing so, I believe we can learn how to deal with our own problems. I think, too, that if we thus look upon him with considerate eyes, we shall be inspired to seek, in public affairs, for more charitable and better instructed judgments upon public men and public events than are common now. We are apt, unconsciously and almost inevitably, to confuse in our minds the Lincoln of to-day-the Lincoln of history, as he dwells in our hearts and our imaginations—with the actual man who was President of the United States in the dark days of the Civil War, and LINCOLN: "VALIANT-FOR-TRUTH" HON. HENRY CABOT LODGE YOU have asked me to address you upon this, the one Yhundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lin coln; to express for you and to you some of the thoughts which ought to find utterance when, on the completion of the century, we seek to pay fit homage to the memory of that great man. I know not how it may be with the many others, who, in these days of commemoration, will speak of Lincoln, but to me the dominant feeling, as I approach my subject, is a sense of helplessness, and a sharp realization of the impossibility of doing justice to such an occasion. To attempt here a review of his life would be labor lost. Ten stately volumes by those who lived in closest communion with him, and who knew him best, were not more than adequate to tell fitly the story of his life. That story, too, in varying form, is known to all the people, "familiar in their mouths as household words." From the early days of dire poverty, from the log cabin of the shiftless pioneer, ever moving forward in search of a fortune which never came, from the picture of the boy working his sums, or reading his Bible and his Milton by the red light of the fire, the marvellous tale goes onward and upward to the solemn scene of the second inaugural, and to the burial of the great chief amid the lamentations of a nation. We know it all, and the story is one of the great treasures of the American people. Still more impossible would it be in a brief moment here to draw, even in the barest outline, a sketch of the events in which his was the commanding presence, for that would be to write the history of the United States during the most crowded and most terrible years of our existence as a nation. Yet if Lincoln's life and deeds, by their very magnitude, thus exclude us from any attempt even to enumerate them, there is, nevertheless, something still better which we can do upon this day, forever made memorable by his birth. We can render to him what I venture to think is the truest homage, that which I believe he would prize most, and compared to which any other is little more than lip service. We can pause to-day in the hurry of daily life and contemplate that great, lonely, tragic figure-that imagination with its touch of the poet, that keen, strong mind, with its humor and its pathos, that splendid common sense and pure character-and then learn from the life which the possessor of all these qualities lived, and from the deeds which he did, lessons which may not be without value to each one of us in our own lives, in teaching us the service which we should render to our country. Let me express my meaning, with slight variation, in his own immortal words: The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what [he] did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which he who fought here has thus far so nobly advanced. In his spirit, I am about to suggest a few thoughts among the many which have come to me as I have meditated upon the life of Abraham Lincoln, and upon what, with that great theme before me, I should say to you to-day. I desire first, if I can, to take you back for a moment to the living man, and thereby show you what some of his trials were, and how he met them, for, in doing so, I believe we can learn how to deal with our own problems. I think, too, that if we thus look upon him with considerate eyes, we shall be inspired to seek, in public affairs, for more charitable and better instructed judgments upon public men and public events than are common now. We are apt, unconsciously and almost inevitably, to confuse in our minds the Lincoln of to-day-the Lincoln of history, as he dwells in our hearts and our imaginations-with the actual man who was President of the United States in the dark days of the Civil War, and who struggled forward amid difficulties greater, almost, than any ever encountered by a leader of men. Mankind has never lost its capacity for weaving myths, or its inborn love for them. This faculty, or rather this innate need of human nature, is apparent in the earliest pages of human history. The beautiful and tragic myths, born of the Greek imagination, which have inspired poets and dramatists for three thousand years, come to us out of the dim past with the light of a roseate dawn upon them. They come to us alike in the great verse of Homer, and veiled in the gray mists of the north, where we descry the shadows of fighting men, and hear the clash of swords and the wild screams of the Valkyries. The leaders of tribes, the founders of States, the eponymous and autochthonous heroes in the infancy of civilization were all endowed by the popular imagination with a divine descent and a near kinship to the gods. We do not give our heroes godlike ancestors-although I have seen a book which traces the pedigree of Washington to Odin-but when they are great enough, we transmute the story of their lives into a myth, just like the Greeks and the Norsemen. Do not imagine from this that I am about to tell you of the "real" or the "true" Lincoln. Nothing would be more alien to my purpose, or more distasteful, for I have observed that, as a rule, when these words are prefixed to the subject of a biography it usually means that we have spread before us a collection of petty details and unworthy gossip which presents an utterly distorted view of a great man, which is, in substance, entirely false, and which gratifies only those envious minds which like to see superiority brought down to their own level. Such presentations are as ignoble and base as the popular myth, however erroneous, is loving and beautiful-a manifestation of that noble quality in human nature which Carlyle has described in his "Hero Worship." I wish merely to detach Lincoln from the myth -which has possession of us all-that his wisdom, his purity, and his greatness were as obvious and acknowledged in his lifetime as they are to-day. We have this same feeling about the one man in American history who stands beside Lincoln |