his theory to have been wrong. Fending alike the dangers from the imperium and the vulgus, from scented pride and unsoaped envy, he steered by the middle channel. Our troubles have not been from the chart, but from the crew! The white of an egg and the venom of a rattlesnake are both albuThe difference between food and poison is a matter of slight chemical proportion. The revolution was a mighty evolution. It was at last perceived to have been a struggle for English liberties, too; that Burke and Chatham were right, and the fatuous Lord North and the fat-witted George III. were wrong. We had fought the good fight of a man against prerogative, as we fought again for labor as against caste. That was true, even if Mr. Gladstone, the great tide-waiter of the nineteenth century [applause and laughter], could not see it; even if that licensed and fascinating scold Carlyle did interpret the roar and smoke of our civil war as "the burning out of an old chimney," and seemed not to care if the house went with it. John Bull whistled, but found his whistle a costly toy. So little do men perceive of where the point lies whose heads are thick with the wit of Punch. [Laughter and applause.] But the beginning was not the end, nor is the end yet, tho "now is our salvation nearer than when we first believed." The old factional elements gathered in partisan antagonism. It may be gravely doubted whether if that tortuous and temporizing reactionary, Thomas Jefferson, had not fortunately been absent in France his jealous weight would not have sufficed to "turn the poised and trembling scale" away from nationality. We moved in and began to live under the "new roof." Thenceon our history becomes an effort to realize both the Constitution and ourselves. Hamilton thought the Union "might endure thirty years" how nearly did he divine the reach of the Virginia resolutions and the date of nullification!-but even he did not see that the instrument was an effect rather than a cause, that while it registered so much it subtended far more! It was a law; but the nation was a life. Great as were the specific bequests the residuum was far greater. The testators did not measure their legacy. They did not then know that they were bequeathing an estate, which some perfervid orator described as "bounded on the north by the aurora, on the east by the sunrise, on the south by the precession of the equinoxes, and on the west by the day of judgment!" [Cheers.] For three-score years and ten, two principles, the centripetal and the centrifugal, were in collision, and making ready to grapple. Then, after that appointed labor and sorrow, the enduring knowledge that our orbit is an ellipse, with its two foci, both determinate and mutual. It was the school of pain: but it was God's! It was sharp surgery: but with a blessed end. The very being of this Union went into the crucible, and melted in the furnace of Antietam, and Shiloh, and Chickamauga, and the Wilderness. We, too, as all-American, will cherish the memory of the devoted, if mistaken, bravery of Albert Sidney Johnson and of Stonewall Jackson, and of his sword who was turned back from Round Top, while we repudiate the oligarchic fallacies of Toombs and Stephens. Where these failed let no feebler hands attempt. The cause of separation is a lost cause! The great replevin has been served! I am a Federalist! It is no vague theory. It affirms the solidarity, the common destiny, of a people. I am with Washington as against Jefferson, for John Jay as against George Clinton, for Webster as against Calhoun, for Lincoln as against Davis, for those two Southerners, Farragut and Thomas, against Lee; for Alexander Hamilton, as against that other, whose treacherous nature Hamilton so clearly discovered, and who with treason and murder upon his soul, went out from the vice-presidency as Aaron of old from the presence of the Lord-a leper. [Great applause.] The whole is both the sum of all its garts, and is itself greater than that sum. True patriotism is synthetic. I love best my duty to the whole. Those dreadful swaths of the dead were not reaped for nought! While the uncounted brave sleep on, and the constellations march west until the reveille of the archangel, let the survivors and heirs of that bitter time lock hands, and standing with blending cheers and tears above A UNION INDISSEVERABLE AND PURE 23 the buried armies, register an implacable oath that no bastard doctrine of unfraternity shall ever again assail our common hearthstone! And let history go for this at least, that the Constitution down to its latest amendment shall be best interpreted by its friends. [Applause.] We are called to meet the trials of a new age. Our expanding nation requires that, as by a pantagraph, old fundamental principles be extended to enlarged problems. This Union that we love is imperial in opportunity, therefore in duty. Ability is responsibility. By the grace of God responsibility is ability. What we ought, we can! Let us swear it—what we can, we will. So once as old Leonidas Held his, will we our bivouac, With daybreak crowd the narrow pass, The army's dulled edged whetting keen, So Farragut, with steady keel, And set the stars above Mobile ! To build our platforms to the rock; So hew them rough, but hew them strong- With smiting knees, spell out their doom! Give clean men clean sweep with clean broom. So shall a people's candidate Again in spotless toga wait. Out on the shuffled lying tissues! What patriots mean, let parties say, Confront the living, bleeding issues, And do the deeds that dare today. [Loud applause.] No State bears the name of Hamilton, as none is yet named for Lincoln: but this Union of States, one endowment, one land, one history, one task, one flag, one God, is the deathless memorial of them both. I join their names and their service. Let it grow from more to more, as the ample fulfillment of them both a realm of magnificent, because equal, laws, administered by fearless, because incorruptible, men. Until out of the calm eternities shall break the days of the Son of Man, let it be our unanimous prayer and our unshaken pledge, "Each of us for every other, and God for us all!" [Loud and longcontinued applause.] Abraham Lincoln. AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE UNION LEAGUE CLUB OF BROOKLYN, FEBRUARY 12, 1895. Mr. President and Gentlemen-It is time for an American Book of Days. The land we love is old enough and rich. enough in men and achievements to have a rubricated record all its own. The dates which punctuate its great events, its births and burials, its successive and interwoven crises of national evolution, its high tides and low, its "storms and tempests greater than almanacs can report," its feasts and fasts, its anguish and its anthems-these dates make a calendar with all its weeks illuminated and emphatic. More than we often pause to remember are we rich in history, not of a continental, but of a world-wide significance. Our life is of inter-centurial and planetary import. Each month is a volume, with its peculiar, illustrious and garlanded events. Wonder at all that our Aprils have witnessed, recall the annals of our great Julys, and then, you who love your country and treasure in your hearts. her excellences of character and action-her sins, her repentances, her renewed probations-turn your thoughts to February, least in length of the twelve, but with two natal days, starset and resplendent, and own the month that has such a 22d and such a 12th, the chief and brightest in all the round of the zodiac! We are met, under the compulsions of a common reverence, to keep high festival, upon one of Columbia's cradle-nights, nay, to recall the gift, thro us, of one of the royal heirs of a world's admiration and affection. Ours indeed he is: but |