their past. And their common hope is, that this Union shall be maintained as a demonstration of the permanency of democracy; that its influence shall be for the betterment of the life of the world, for the uplift of humanity, and for the advancement of civilization.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A MAN OF THE PEOPLE

MY

PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON

Y earliest recollection is of standing at my father's gateway in Augusta, Georgia, when I was four years old, and hearing some one pass and say that Mr. Lincoln was elected and there was to be war. Catching the intense tones of his excited voice, I remember running in to ask my father what it meant. What it meant, you need not be told. What it meant, we shall not here to-day dwell upon. We shall rather turn away from those scenes of struggle and of unhappy fraternal strife, and recall what has happened since to restore our balance, to remind us of the permanent issues of history, to make us single-hearted in our love of America, and united in our purpose for her advancement. We are met here to-day to recall the character and achievements of a man who did not stand for strife, but for peace, and whose glory it was to win the affection alike of those whom he led and of those whom he opposed, as indeed a man and a king among those who mean the right.

It is not necessary that I should rehearse for you the life of Abraham Lincoln. It has been written in every school book. It has been rehearsed in every family. It were to impeach your intelligence if I were to tell you the story of his life. I would rather attempt to expound for you the meaning of his life, the significance of his singular and unique career.

It is a very long century that separates us from the year of his birth. The nineteenth century was crowded with many significant events,-it seems to us in America as if it were more crowded with significant events for us than for any other nation of the world,-and that far year 1809 stands very near its opening, when men were only beginning to understand what was in store for them. It was a significant

century, not only in the field of politics but in the field of thought. Do you realize that modern science is not older than the middle of the last century? Modern science came into the world to revolutionize our thinking and our material enterprises just about the time that Mr. Lincoln was uttering those remarkable debates with Mr. Douglas. The struggle which determined the life of the Union came just at the time when a new issue was joined in the field of thought, and men began to reconstruct their conceptions of the universe and of their relation to nature, and even of their relation to God. There is, I believe, no more significant century in the history of man than the nineteenth century, and its whole sweep is behind us.

That year 1809 produced, as you know, a whole group of men who were to give distinction to its annals in many fields of thought and of endeavor. To mention only some of the great men who were born in 1809: the poet Tennyson was born in that year, our own poet Edgar Allan Poe, the great Sherman, the great Mendelssohn, Chopin, Charles Darwin, William E. Gladstone, and Abraham Lincoln. Merely read that list and you are aware of the singular variety of gifts and purposes represented. Tennyson was, to my thinking, something more than a poet. We are apt to be so beguiled by the music of his verse as to suppose that its charm and power lie in its music; but there is something about the poet which makes him the best interpreter, not only of life, but of national purpose, and there is to be found in Tennyson a great body of interpretation which utters the very voice of Anglo-Saxon liberty. That fine line in which he speaks of how English liberty has "broadened down from precedent to precedent" embodies the noble slowness, the very process and the very certainty, of the forces which made men politically free in the great century in which he wrote. He was a master who saw into the heart of affairs, as well as a great musician who seemed to give them the symphony of sound.

And then there was our own Poe, that exquisite workman in the human language, that exquisite artisan in all the nice

effects of speech, the man who dreamed all the odd dreams of the human imagination, and who quickened us with all the singular stories that the mind can invent, and did it all with the nicety and certainty of touch of the consummate artist.

And then there were Chopin and Mendelssohn, whose music constantly rings in our ears and lifts our spirits to new sources of delight. And there was Charles Darwin, with an insight into nature next to Newton's own; and Gladstone, who knew how to rule men by those subtle forces of oratory which shape the history of the world and determine the relations of nations to each other.

And then our Lincoln. When you read that name you are at once aware of something that distinguishes it from all the rest. There was in each of those other men some special gift, but not in Lincoln. You cannot pick Lincoln out for any special characteristic. He did not have any one of those peculiar gifts that the other men on this list possessed. He does not seem to belong in a list at all; he seems to stand unique and singular and complete in himself. The name makes the same impression upon the ear that the name of Shakespeare makes, because it is as if he contained a world within himself. And that is the thing which marks the singular stature and nature of this great-and, we would fain believe, typical-American. Because when you try to describe the character of Lincoln you seem to be trying to describe a great process of nature. Lincoln seems to have been of general human use and not of particular and limited human use. There was no point at which life touched him that he did not speak back to it instantly its meaning. There was no affair that touched him to which he did not give back life, as if he had communicated a spark of fire to kindle it. The man seemed to have, slumbering in him, powers which he did not exert of his own choice, but which woke the moment they were challenged, and for which no challenge was too great or comprehensive.

You know how slow, how almost sluggish the development of the man was.

You know how those who consorted with him

in his youth noted the very thing of which I speak. They would have told you that Abraham Lincoln was good for nothing in particular; and the singular fact is he was good for nothing in particular-he was good for everything in general. He did not narrow and concentrate his power, because it was meant to be diffused as the sun itself. And so he went through his youth like a man who has nothing to do, like a man whose mind is never halted at any point where it becomes serious, to seize upon the particular endeavor or occupation for which it is intended. He went from one sort of partial success to another sort of partial success, or, as his contemporaries would have said, from failure to failure, until-not until he found himself, but until, so to say, affairs found him, and the crisis of a country seemed suddenly to match the universal gift of his nature; until a great nature was summed up, not in any particular business or activity, but in the affairs of a whole country. It was characteristic of the man.

Have you ever looked at some of those singular statues of the great French sculptor Rodin-those pieces of marble in which only some part of a figure is revealed and the rest is left in the hidden lines of the marble itself; where there emerges the arm and the bust and the eager face, it may be, of a man, but his body disappears in the general bulk of the stone, and the lines fall off vaguely? I have often been made to think, in looking at those statues, of Abraham Lincoln. There was a little disclosed in him, but not all. You feel that he was so far from being exhausted by the demands of his life that more remained unrevealed than was disclosed to our view. The lines run off into infinity and lead the imagination into every great conjecture. We wonder what the man might have done, what he might have been, and we feel that there was more promise in him when he died than when he was born; that the force was so far from being exhausted that it had only begun to display itself in its splendor and perfection. No man can think of the life of Lincoln without feeling that the man was cut off almost at his beginning.