tion of the currency and the heaping up of financial deficits, with burdening pension-list imposts, Mr. Lincoln, at the expiring of his first term, was reëlected in 1864, with Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, on the ticket with him for Vice-President. Mr. Lincoln's election for a new term gave occasion for the preparation and delivery of the great Chief's Second Inaugural Address (delivered at Washington, Mar. 4. 1865), an utterance of brief, but dignified and memorable, interest. In the address, as it has been observed, are to be noted Mr. Lincoln's characteristic "tenderness and compassion, blended with stern energy and iron firmness of will, which shrank from bloodshed and violence, yet counted any sacrifice of blood and treasure as of little account in comparison with the transcendent blessing of national union and liberty." It closes with the following fine adjuration: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to build up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." More brief still, but surpassing the Second Inaugural in pathetic tenderness and high literary interest, is Mr. Lincoln's address at the Dedication (Nov. 19, 1863) of the Gettysburg National Cemetery. For simple but fervid eloquence and unstudied beauty of rhetoric, the Address has hardly its equal among the immortal utterances of the world's oratory. Especially noteworthy is the dignity of its rhythmic sentences, as are its reticence and its remarkable condensation. How true and touching, as well as beautiful, is the following passage: "We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us: that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that Government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth." The auspicious aspect of affairs in 1865, in the prospect of a speedy termination of the prolonged and disastrous war, spread elation over the North and was an immense relief to all classes of the people. By President Lincoln it was hailed with manifest inward satisfaction; while great was his delight at the coming peaceful reunion of the nation. Happily, ere his own tragic death came, he was to learn of almost the final incident in the long chronicle of internecine strife, for at Appomattox, on April 9th, Lee, the great leader of the Southern arms, surrendered the army of Northern Virginia to General Grant, and practically the end came of the rebellion. In startling and pitiful contrast to the return of peace over the land, was the event which sent a thrill of horror throughout and beyond the nation, the striking down of the loved President, at Ford's Theatre in Washington, on the evening of April 14th, by the weapon of the assassin, J. Wilkes Booth, "a demented sympathizer with the cause of disunion." Early in the morning of the following fateful day, Lincoln's soul passed from its earthly tenement, and a pall of deep gloom spread over the land, broken only by the lamentations of the people he loved so well. The funeral obsequies of the martyred chieftain a day or two later followed, and Lincoln's remains were borne amid mighty pageantries to their last resting place in Springfield, Ill., the patriot President's former home. The Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, we need hardly relate, succeeded to the office of the chief magistracy of the Republic; while the great war reached its close with the fall of Richmond, the flight and subsequent capture of Jefferson Davis, and the clement issue of a proclamation of amnesty, with the happy return of the Union soldiers and sailors to private life. The work of Reconstruction, to which Lincoln had begun to address himself before his sadly-mourned death, now passed to other hands, while the nation lost in this important task what doubtless would have been of rich and priceless service to it. Though passed from earth, the memory of the great Emancipator is enshrined in the hearts of his admiring countrymen; while he has a no less abidingplace in history and on the proud roll of a nation's benefactors. "Our children shall behold his fame, The kindly, earnest, brave, foreseeing man, ABRAHAM LINCOLN. BY TOM TAYLOR, IN LONDON Punch, APRIL, 1865. “How humble, yet how hopeful, he could be ; How, in good fortune and in ill, the same; Nor bitter in success, nor boastful he, Thirsty for gold, nor feverish for fame. He went about his work-such work as few Ever had laid on head and heart and hand, As one who knows, where there's a task to do, Man's honest will must Heaven's good grace command; Who trusts the strength will with the burden grow, If but that will we can arrive to know, Nor tamper with the weights of good and ill. So he went forth to battle, on the side That he felt clear was Liberty's and Right's, As in his peasant boyhood he had plied His warfare with rude Nature's thwarting mights; The uncleared forest, the unbroken soil, The iron-bark that turns the lumberer's axe, The rapid that o'erbears the boatman's toil, The prairie, hiding the mazed wanderer's tracks. So he grew up, a destined work to do, And lived to do it; four long-suffering years, Ill-fate, ill-feeling, ill-report, lived through, And then he heard the hisses, changed to cheers, The taunts to tribute, the abuse to praise, And took both with the same unwavering mood; Till, as he came on light, from darkling days, And seemed to touch the goal from where he stood, A felon hand, between the goal and him, Reached from behind his back, a trigger prest, And those perplexed and patient eyes were dim, Those gaunt, long-laboring limbs were laid to rest! The words of mercy were upon his lips, Forgiveness in his heart and on his pen, When this vile murderer brought swift eclipse To thoughts of peace on earth, good will to men." SPEECHES OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. THE PERPETUATION OF OUR POLTICAL [An Address, delivered Jan. 27, 1837, to a Young Men's Lyceum organization in Springfield, Ill., which Mr. Lincoln had taken part in founding for the mutual improvement of its members. In it, it will be seen, how thoughtfully Lincoln refers to the prevalent evils of mob rule, and points out the danger that menaces political institutions in a lack of reverence for law and the displacement of reason by passion and wild appeals to passion]. IN the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them; they are a legacy bequeathed us by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed, race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves us, of this goodly land, and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; 't is ours only to transmit thesethe former unprofaned by the foot of an invader, the latter undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by 1 |