South to the man who stood at the head of the North in the time of dissension. Mr. Page expressed his appreciation of the honor shown him in being asked "as the Southern man, to speak on this notable occasion, to celebrate, here in the Capital of the nation, where he achieved his great and abiding fame, the Centenary of the birth of the man who, more than any other man or group of men, saved the nation." The closing words of the address of Mr. Page, speaking of the South"But the passing years are sweeping away the mist that obscured her vision, and she is coming more and more to see Lincoln as he was, as a great-hearted and large-minded man who, had he lived, might have been her defender in the hour of her greatest trial-whose last acts were acts of kindness, and whose last words were words of good will and peace toward the South as well as the North"-were enthusiastically applauded by the great gathering which included in its midst a number of Confederate veterans. In the evening of the Centenary, the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, Commandery of the District of Columbia, gave a banquet, about four hundred men sitting down to the table; while the balcony was crowded with women who came to look on at the scene of festivity. programme contained the names of men of national prominence. The On the same evening, the Central Labor Union met at Odd Fellows' Hall in honor of the day, and here addresses were made by well known statesmen, and many labor leaders, including Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, and Miss Phoebe Couzins, the Womans' Suffrage leader. LINCOLN AND THE CHARACTER OF AMERICAN IT CIVILIZATION HON. JOAQUIM NABUCO was not without much hesitation that I accepted the invitation to speak by the side of the distinguished men chosen to address you on this great occasion, but when I was told that I would represent here the sentiment. of Latin America, I felt that was a call I could not fail to answer. The presence at this place of any single foreign nation, in the person of its official representative, would be a sufficient acknowledgment that Lincoln belongs to all the world. But there are reasons why the other nations of this continent feel themselves more closely associated with him than the rest of the world, and why they owe him the greater gratitude after that of the United States. We are bound, indeed, to form with you a political moral unit, and no man, after Washington, has done more than Lincoln to strengthen the magnet that attracts us to you. Washington created the American freedom; Lincoln purified it. Personally, I owe to Lincoln, not only the choice, but the easy fulfillment of what I consider was my task in life, as it was the task of so many others the emancipation of the slaves. Nobody, indeed, could say what would have been the struggle for abolition in Brazil, if, past the middle of the nineteenth century, a new and powerful nation had sprung up in America, having for its creed the maintenance and the expansion of slavery. Through what Lincoln did, owing to the great light he kindled for all the world with his Proclamation, we could win our cause without a drop of blood being shed. In fact, we won it in a national embrace the slave-owners themselves, with the lavishness of their letters of manumission, emulating the action of the laws of freedom, successively enacted. Lincoln, like Washington, is one of the few great men in history about whom the moral sense of mankind is not divided. His record is, throughout, one of inspiration. His part at the White House was that of the national Fate. To-day, when one looks from this distance of time to the fields of that terrible Civil War, one sees in them, not only the shortest cut, but the only possible road, to a common national destiny. I construe to myself that War as one of those illusions of life, in which men seem to move of their own free will, projected by a Providence intent on saving their nation from the course she was pursuing. Nobody can say what would have been the duration of slavery, if the Southern States had not acted as they did. By seceding, they doomed it to death and saved themselves. In that way the Secession, although a wholly different episode, will have had in the history of the United States the same effect that the secession of the people to the Sacred Mount had in the history of Rome, in the early period of the Republic-that is, that of cementing the national unity and of assuring the destiny of the nation for centuries of everwidening power. Lincoln, with the special sense bestowed by the Author of that great Play, upon one entrusted with its leading part, saw distinctly that the South was not a nation, and that it would not think of being one, except during the hallucination of the crisis. If the South had been a nation, the North, with all its strength, would not have subdued it. Neither would the American people care to have a foreign nation attached to its side by conquest; nor would a coerced nation, after such a bloody war, reënter the Union in the spirit of staying forever, as did the South, once the passion spent that moved it to secede. I believe such was the feeling of General Lee during the whole campaign; only he could not utter it, and the secret died with him. But only such a feeling could have kept his surrender free from all bitterness, as if he had only fought a duel of honor for the South. Nothing is so beautiful to me in the celebration of this first centenary of Lincoln, as the tributes of men who represent the noblest spirit of the South. I came here to say a word-I have said it. With the increased velocity of modern changes, we do not know what the world will be a hundred years hence. For, surely, the ideals of the generation of the year 2000 will not be the same as those of the generation of the year 1900. Nations will then be governed by currents of political thought which we can no more anticipate than could the seventeenth century anticipate the political currents of the eighteenth, which still in part sway us. But whether the spirit of authority-or that of freedom-increases, Lincoln's story will ever appear more luminous in the amalgamation of centuries, because he supremely incarnated both those spirits. And this veneration for Lincoln's memory, throughout the world, is bound more and more to centre in this city-which was the exclusive theatre of his glory, and which alone could reflect the anxieties and the elations of his heart during the whole performance of his great part in history-as holding the great preeminent title of being the place of his martyrdom. I am proud of having spoken here at his first Centennial in the name of Latin America. We all owe to Lincoln the immense debt of having fixed forever the free character of American civilization. |