Firing of Presidential Salute by the Illinois Naval Reserve, Feb. 12, 1909, at the South End of Lincoln Park, Chicago

(The Saint Gaudens statue of Lincoln is seen at the left)

and will have, but few peers and no superior in the annals of the onflowing centuries.

We sons of Illinois particularly rejoice that he was ours. We gave him to the Union. Among us he spent his years of preparation. It is significant that the President that saved the nation was a Western man. The issues around which the War was fought had indeed become acute in measure as the West became a factor in the destiny of the nation. Were the new States to be kept clean of the blight of slavery? That was the pith of the dispute. The wheat and corn belt would not pay homage to King Cotton. It seemed to be in the order of things that the leader should hail from the West. Western regiments, in sober truth, composed the élite of the army, as the West had been the most pronounced adversary of State rights and secession. This West was peopled by immigrants. They had pilgrimed with the sun from New England, the classic home of Pilgrim civilization; and then from Germany, lovers of freedom, idealists, and dreamers, yet sturdy farmers and clear thinkers withal; and also from Ireland, carrying with them the hatred of despotism and the flaming courage to dare and to do. These new wheat fields furnished sustenance to the fighting nation. Their wealth made good the deficiency caused by the blockaded shore line of the cotton-raising States, for cotton had been the nation's means of exchange for Europe's advances in money and ammunition.

The ways of Providence are strange. Three days after Lincoln's birth, another American was laid into his mother's arms, who was to revolutionize the patriarchal methods of bringing into the granary the fruit of the field-Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the reaper. His invention, perfected shortly before the outbreak of the War, multiplied every arm on the field, and in the barn, and on the threshing floor, tenfold. The time element was reduced most marvellously in the equation of harvesting. Thus the rich acres of the West could spare the sturdy men that enlisted in the Union's battalions, and yet their blessing, the staff of life, which they offered so abundantly, could be milled and mar

keted. The West was made available for the defense of the flag by McCormick's mechanical substitute for human hands. The President from the West, when the first victories also were those won by the Western army corps under generals from the West, saw the dawn of peace light up the sky with new hope, but then-another Moses, vouchsafed merely a prophetic vision of the realization-he had to lay down his life that the new covenant of love might be firmly sealed by his blood.

When he fell, the world wept. They that but yesterday had carried the musket for the defense of what they believed to be their rights, the men who wore the battle-tattered gray, felt that in him they lost their truest friend. Monarchs shed a tear at his bier. The noblest of rulers had ascended to glory. They knew none to the purple born who bore escutcheon more lustrous than was his, the great commoner's.

But we at this hour must not forget that memory spells also monition. How do we measure up against him? He laid tribute on the graves of those that died that the government of the people, for the people, and by the people might not perish. No enemy from without, indeed, is threatening the permanence of our institutions, the independence of our State, the prosperity of our people. We have been garnering the harvest of the day of Appomattox. Ours is now a world empire. But is ours, for all this, a government of the people? Is it not a government of politicians, for politicians? Serious question this, inviting searching of the heart. Has increase in wealth tended to undemocratize our manners, our ambitions? Has it obscured our ideals, placed near the altar new, strange deities wrought of gold? Are these the Gods that have led us forth out of Egypt, out of the crucible of trial and distress? Has there been profounder reverence for law among us, the heirs of the men that were giants in those gigantic days?

Great men are mountain peaks. As we look up toward the peak named the Martyr-Saviour-President, shall the lifted finger, tipped with the gold of glorious sunshine, not be for us sign and symbol that our way shall lead upwards? The

mountain range of which he is the highest point embraces many crests. Grant, Seward, Stanton, Sherman, Sheridan, Logan, Schurz, Sumner, Morton, Yates, Curtis, and a host of other names tell their significance. Yet high as they are, their height is worthily crowned and completed in the one that stands out above all in superb majesty-Abraham Lincoln.