THE FIGURE OF AN AGE

(A Speech of Introduction)

HON. STEPHEN S. GREGORY

IT is well in this great Republic that we do not forget her

distinguished sons. By studying the lessons of their lives, by frequently recalling their virtues and their excellencies, national ideals are elevated and national character strengthened and developed.

We are met to commemorate upon this centennial anniversary, the birth and the life of a great American.

Born in obscurity and of humble parentage, reared in want and poverty, denied almost all educational advantages, the plainest of the plain people, he stands to-day, secure in the Pantheon of Nations, the great colossal figure of his age and time.

Disappointed and embittered, as he sometimes seems to have been by his earlier political experiences, he lived to witness that great triumph of human freedom, to the struggle for which his life was consecrated, and to which he was designated by a higher than any earthly power.

In a peculiar sense Abraham Lincoln belongs to Illinois. Here in this city, amid the gathering clouds of civil strife and discord, he was selected to bear the banner of freedom. From his humble home at our capital he went forth to his stupendous career, to his glorious martyrdom. Thither he was borne after the last sad tragedy, and there upon our soil he sleeps until the earth shall give up its dead.

We knew him when we gave him to mankind. The world knows him now; and to the last syllable of recorded time he can not be forgotten.

THE GREAT COMMONER

G

DR. EMIL G. HIRSCH

REAT men are like towering mountain peaks. They

stand out in bold and sharp loneliness above the lowlands of the many-companied multitude of the undistinguished and the unfamed. And yet they are, for all their grandeur, of one formation with the deeper levels. But they catch the first flash of the morning sun, and the expiring day's regretful good-night kiss is imprinted upon their brow. And when thus the breaking dawn's blush is upon them and the glow of the retreating twilight weaves around them its golden halo, they loom up veritable torches kindled to light the path for the wayfarers in the valleys beneath. Like mountains, their magnitude escapes the beholder from too near a point of observation. While they live they jostle against the throng in the market and the street. Their voice rings out from the platform, indeed, but its peculiar note is not detected because others of lesser quality have aroused the echo as well. And they who in heated debate heard their appeal and argument or touched elbows with them as they hurried to their daily task, cannot but carry from the contact and concourse the feeling that even giants are kneaded of the clay that mothers all mortality. Only when time has raised a screen between the days in which it was theirs to act their part, and subsequent years when what was a burning issue around which flamed passion and flowered intrigue has grown to be the cherished conviction of the later born-they who in the days of their vigorous manhood were rated and berated partisans are summoned from their graves, exemplars of patriotic devotion, monuments of human greatness. When they and their generation have entered into rest, their fame leaps to the welcoming skies. It is hailed a talisman for the nation

their grave a Mecca, where the faithful seek and find inspiration. The old prophets of Israel had power to break the shackles of death even after their mortality had been laid away in the rock-hewn tomb. This marvellous gift is shared by the memory of the truly glorious.

And herein lies the deeper significance of a day like this. The ancient Greeks fabled about a spring with magic to restore youth to them that courted the embrace of its waters. It is said that as nations grow old their memorial days increase. This is one way of stating the truth. The other is that those nations retain their youth who cherish the memory of their great. This anniversary hour visits us to bestow upon us new strength. It challenges inquiry whether we have proven worthy heirs of the fathers. For every memory is also a monitor. One hundred years have run their circling rounds since the incarnation of Abraham Lincoln-forty and four links of this chain mark the number of solar circuits since his ascension to immortality. What is he for us? What message for us comes on the wing of this centenary?

Lincoln types for us the best and the noblest American. The mountain peaks are of one formation with the lower levels. The best that is within us had body and soul in him. America spells opportunity. His life illustrates the verity of this observation. In other lands birth and descent too often decide the place where the late comer shall live his life. Destiny does not signify future; it signifies past. Not so in this blessed country. The upward path to distinction is not closed in by barbed wire. Character and capacity, not coronets, are the credentials which admit to the company of the leaders. By strange coincidence Lincoln shared one birthday with Charles Darwin. The name of this great naturalist is forever, but not altogether rightfully, associated with the theory that environment and heredity are the decisive factors of the equation of life. It is as though Providence has intended to bring out the supremacy of personality over environment, and therefore called into being on one and the same day these two great pathfinders. If ever circumstances prognosticated obscurity, those did into which Lincoln was

ushered in the hour of his birth. He was of good stock. This, in the light of inquiry into the antecedents of his parents, cannot be denied. But they from whose loins he sprang had but little to give him of this earth's goods. The saying of old sages of Israel comes to mind: "Have ye heed of the children of poverty, for from them shall go forth glory." Our colonial and national history is replete with examples verifying the philosophy of this observation, as, indeed, the pages telling the story of Biblical times are a running commentary thereon. He who was to become the saviour of his nation was welcomed to life by surroundings like those that witnessed the advent of another babe acclaimed by millions the Saviour of mankind. Whatever star may have shone over the birth-chamber of Lincoln, none in that Kentucky Bethlehem was aware of its prophetic brilliancy. Poverty was a permanent lodger in that household. It bent over the child's cradle and dogged the faltering step of his brief years of play. It denied him access to books and schooling. It hurried him on to work at a time when his frame was but little equal to the burden. It laid responsibilities on his shoulders when he should have been given counsel and guidance. But all this contrived to bring out in vigor his dower of conquering and masterful will-power. Steel is won when cruel blows or searching blasts stir the iron to fight. Life, too, is a Bessemer process. For the Lincolns, the men of genuine American mould, every blow and every blast is provocation to self-development. Circumstance for them is a negative quantity. Their character, the will to attain unto manhood, is the positive factor assuring them the victory. The bookless boy dies companion of the masters of his native tongue, and his writings stand forth patterns of classic diction. The boy who was denied the privilege of entering the halls of learning and to drink his fill at the horn of wisdom which Plato and Aristotle had brimmed, or to wing his tongue under emulation of Demosthenes and Cicero, as a man astonishes the world with the penetration of his insight into the ruling principles of statecraft, the eloquence of his pleading, the acumen and versatility of his argument. He, the awkward backwoods

lawyer, throws down the gauntlet to the Little Giant of the rostrum and shows that his blade is indeed of Saracen keenness and elasticity, and in attack and defence worthy of the opponent's oft tried sword. Lincoln personalized the grit of the American people. In him came to fullest flower and real presence, that combination of resourcefulness and stubborn pluck which crowned the American conqueror of the prairies' rolling tracts, the primeval forests' tangles, the mountains' rocky ramparts, the rivers' raging wrath. The persistence and perseverance which the nation as a whole applied to the building of the great emporia, and the exploitation of mines, and the erection of mills, and the spreading of markets, he energized in making himself.

He himself throughout his rising years which lifted him up from lowliness and set him among the princes-yea, the princes of his people-remained the plain, modest, rugged, strong American. Because the genius of his people had become flesh in him, he never lost contact with the plain folkafter all, the supporting pillar of the great nation's greatness, the Gibraltar of its protection and power. Never did he attempt to put them away from him. He, indeed, was the mountain peak, in its own elevation proclaiming the prowess of the strata out of which it rises to nearer communion with the clouds. This kinship of his with the plain folk comes to gratifying light in that gift of his, in his own lifetime, and still more expressively after his death, the centre of an everwidening circle of legend. Legend always is tribute paid to genuine greatness by neighborhood and posterity conscious of their spiritual affinity to the distinguished and elect, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh. Around neither the ordinary nor the supercilious, is web of legend spun. In attributing to Lincoln the authorship of so many stories, many of which are doubtless apocryphal, the sound sense of the people that has given currency to the anecdotes has for very truth picked out the one quality in the mental equipment of their hero which sets into bold relief his sound Americanism. Irony and satire are exotics. They are bacteria incidental to putrefaction and dissolution. Humor is indigenous to our