ABRAHAM LINCOLN OF ILLINOIS

PRESIDENT EDWIN ERLE SPARKS

"Born to thine own and every coming age,
Original American, emancipator, sage,
Thy country's saviour, posterity's joy,

We hail thy birthday, noble son of Illinois."

N all the annals of American history, perhaps I might say in the full page of time itself, there is written no stranger case than that of the man whose birthday is celebrated to-day throughout the length and breadth of these United States; indeed, throughout all the world, wherever American citizens may gather together under the Stars and Stripes. Flung into life in the midst of the most abject poverty, he closed life's fitful fever the peer of kings and the heir of all the ages. Hearing in youth the most common errors in English speech, he yet trained himself by his own efforts to write English which in his Second Inaugural Address and his Gettysburg Address may well be compared for purity to any composition in the English language.

He was a Western President, coming from the State of Illinois, then the westernmost point reached in the choice of a President for the United States. Born in Kentucky, reared in southern Indiana and Illinois, among Southern people, he loved the South; yet, in the Providence of God, he was destined to deal the South a blow, economically and commercially, from which she has not fully recovered to the present time. Such is the strange case of Abraham Lincoln of Illinois.

You and I believe that Abraham Lincoln was destined by God to perform a definite action. If there ever was an agent created for a given purpose, we believe that was Abraham Lincoln. How shall we account for him?

Some say that Lincoln was a miracle. I am not willing to

let it rest at that. What is a miracle? A miracle is God moving in such a way as to confuse human understanding. Lincoln was not a miracle. I believe it is your duty and my duty, in order to ascertain why he was the man for the occasion, to try to examine Lincoln by some of the great laws of creation which have been formulated for us.

We know that "there is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune"; and there is a tide in the affairs of the individual man which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Yet we often say that the man and the occasion rarely meet. Sometimes opportunity seems never to come to a man, and sometimes when the opportunity comes the man is not prepared for it. You and I will agree that in the case of Abraham Lincoln the opportunity came, and the man was ready, and success followed.

In the brief time I have at my disposal, I can take only one or two of those "great laws of creation" and apply them to Abraham Lincoln. First, consider the law of environment. We are all familiar with the workings of that law, the law of surroundings. We have utilized it constantly in many ways; both in our families and in our schools. We ornament our houses and we decorate the walls of our school buildings. Why? Because we believe in the influence of environment, of surroundings. What was the environment of Abraham Lincoln in his formative days? It was the environment of the American frontier.

As the mass of people have moved across this continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, there has always been a front line of hardy spirits-the pioneers; those who felled the forests; those who built the log cabins; those who cultivated the fields. We call them the frontier of the American people, the vanguard of the onward march. Abraham Lincoln lived during all his formative days on what was then the frontier, in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. Many characteristics marked this front line of people. For one thing, it contributed largely to American democracy. It did not make much difference out on the frontier who your grandfather was, but it did make a great deal of difference what

The colonial American was a transplanted specimen, an exotic brought from the Old World; the modern American is generie, a product of Old World inheritance and New World environment. Midway between these two types is the transition stage represented by the pioneer, the frontiersman, the transAlleghenian; his wits sharpened in the struggle for existence, his shrewdness brought out by combats, with natural forces, his sympatty quickened by frequent sight of suffering, his originality ifested by contrast with preeding succeeding normal types, and hi's condity pitifully emphasized by remoteness from contact with what we call Euttun. Countless thousands of these people passed into obscurity: Abraham Lincoln through political preferment and will long survive. Edini E. Sparks

survived

State College, Pa.
Second June

man

and

Facsimile of Manuscript Tribute from Edwin E. Sparks, President

of the Pennsylvania State College

Fiftieth Anniversary

Lincoln and Douglas Debate

Thursday, August 27th, 1908.

he went

to Washington as President; he studied

every question thoroughly, and

lutely honest, not only with offers,

with himself; he had fully the courage of his individual opinion,

his opinion was fully made up, he could not be swerved from it. He defended

great
other

Could have done, bessure he was infintely patient, always kindly, yielding to others in now exentials, but never yeahding one iota of principle.

Facsimile of Manuscript Tribute from Gen. Smith D. Atkins, of Illinois

you could do. It was an aristocracy of worth, not of birth. They had to do things out on the frontier, and Abraham Lincoln was trained in that compelling environment.

What did this frontier do for the man? In the first place, it taught him to investigate. We do little investigating now. Why? Because we have so many books. "What is the use," we say, "of spending time investigating, when we can read it in the books?" Abraham Lincoln had very few books. In all his youthful life he had to look into things himself. The lawyers who travelled with him around the circuit told that frequently when he would see a tree of unusual dimensions or some peculiarity of growth, he would dismount from his horse and examine the tree. When his little son received a mechanical toy, the father was not satisfied until he took it to pieces. He wanted to see how it worked-investigating always. When he came back from serving his second session in Congress, a number of members came with him. They came over the Great Lakes, around by Niagara Falls. Most of the party stayed on deck, talking politics, smoking, and telling stories; but Lincoln was always down in the engineroom, even amongst the stokers, examining everything, finding out how it worked. He showed a natural talent for investigating.

Soon after this Lincoln took out his patent. How many of our Presidents have taken out a patent? I must sometime try to ascertain the answer to that question by looking over the records in the Patent Office, which is a task of no small dimensions. Lincoln took out a patent. What was that patent? Was it applicable to Europe? Was it applicable to the Atlantic coast, or the plains? No, it was something needed over here, in the valley, on the frontier. It was a scheme for navigating the Western waters at times when the rivers were low. During the Summer season, the rivers divided and sandbars appeared. Lincoln's plan was to put buoys under the keels of vessels, and when the vessels came to obstructions, like sandbars in the river, they would inflate these buoys with air, which would lift the vessel over the bar and take it on. That was Lincoln's patent. He never sold