the heirlooms of one being the treasures of all. We come, all you of the blue, and you, too, of the gray, and we of the red-coat and kilted tartan, heritors of the same history, sharers in the same freedom, sons of the same blood; and in the speech that sways from the Gulf to the Arctic Sea we pay our tribute of honor, and reverence, and love to the memory of that greatest world-citizen this continent has known. For among the men born of American women, there has not arisen a greater than Abraham Lincoln.

It is not for me to tell the story of Lincoln's life, the incidents of his great career, or the traditions that gather around his name. All of that has been done again and again in every Lincoln renascence that has marked each decade since his day. It is being done to-day by those who knew him face to face. It is not for me to come from Canada to Illinois to recite Lincoln anecdotes, or to pronounce a Lincoln eulogy. Not as a neighbor, not as an acquaintance, not as a citizen of the same State or of the same nation, may I speak of him as many might speak. To me he stands out, not in the softened light of personal friendship, not even with the glorifying halo of patriotic devotion on his brow. From the long range of another land, from under the shadow of another flag, I see him stand in the great perspective of world-history, not merely the citizen of your State, or the saviour of your Republic, but Lincoln, the world-citizen; Lincoln, the man whose name spells freedom in every land. And for that Lincoln, one of the few immortals of his age and land, I profess the reverence which the nobleness of his character and the heroism of his life must ever command from you of this Republic and from us, too, of the Canadian Dominion. Into our Canadian lives he came as a mighty inspiration, and our childhood's lips were taught to speak his name with that respect we paid our own good and gracious Queen.

I recall as vividly as if it were yesterday the night in that fateful week of April, 1865, when into my childhood's home, on a pioneer farm cut out of the primeval forest of Middlesex County, in Upper Canada, The Toronto Globe came,

American Revolution

Photograph by Resler. Original owned by the Chicago Historical Society

Republican "Wigwam," in which Lincoln Was Nominated, 1860 (The Building stood on Market Street between Randolph and Lake)

bordered in black. Its story read aloud in the family circle brought pain and grief to Canadian hearts. So it came that my very earliest knowledge of your country and its history was in that tragic martyrdom at Washington, and the very first name outside that backwoods settlement in Canada to be inscribed indelibly on my boyhood's honor roll was the name of your own illustrious Lincoln.

The theme which I choose is this: The Significance of Lincoln. I would have you stand with me for a little, not so close to that life as to lose the sense of its great proportions, but not so far away as to miss the meaning and the majesty of its radiating power. If I express some things with which some may not agree-and that must be so it is because I am free to voice honest convictions with unreserve in the presence of free and honest men.

I would have you consider the significance of Lincoln, the meaning of his life, and the reach of his influence, in the century to which he belonged, and in this larger century that reaps the harvests which he sowed.

First, consider the significance of Lincoln to democracy in North America. I mean Canada as well as the United States. And by democracy I mean, not any party form or political organization, but, in the words made immortal by Lincoln at Gettysburg, "government of the people, by the people, for the people."

On this continent, democracy is being worked out through republican forms in the United States, and through forms adapted to monarchical institutions in Canada. In both countries it is democracy. The democratic spirit takes little account of mere names and forms.

Take the situation presented in your own United States. What is the significance of Lincoln in relation to the maintenance and the extension of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" in this Republic? What contribution did he make? What did he save that might have been lost?

For one thing, he served democracy by the very fact of his life, by the potency of his teaching, by the force of his ex

ample. He was by Nature's law a man of the people. He gloried in his kinship with the "plain people." Not because he was born in a rude Kentucky cabin; not because his early life in Indiana and Illinois was spent in sordid poverty— democracy on the one hand, like aristocracy on the other, is not a thing of external conditions, but of the very spirit and purpose and essence of a man's life. By birth and instinct and personal equation George Washington was an aristocrat to his finger-tips. Abraham Lincoln, in the marrow of his bones and through all the texture of his thinking, was a man of the people.

Lincoln knew the people's problem from within. By intuition he understood their case and took their side. In those early Sangamon County days he knew nothing of the teaching of the schools on political economy, or the social problem, or the ethical standard, but by unerring instinct he made his choice. It was the spirit of inborn, true democracy that spoke through him, when, a raw youth in his teens, thirty years before he saw the White House, he looked for the first time on the hard and ugly fact of slavery, and in the slavemarket of New Orleans swore: "If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I'll hit it hard, by the Eternal God!" It was his incurable sense of the rights of man that impelled him in early manhood to declare himself the champion of the unprivileged and the voiceless, "until," as he foretold, 'everywhere in this broad land the sun shall shine, and the rain shall fall, and the wind shall blow upon no man that goes forth to unrequited toil." As the sinewy arrow goes straight to its aim, so his mind struck home to the heart of the age-long problem of capital and labor in all lands when he protested that "no man shall eat bread by the sweat of another man's brow." He had not studied constitutional history, or traced the rise and fall of world kingdoms and commonwealths, but he put the essential wisdom of all the centuries of government into that memorable saying in his senatorial campaign in Chicago in 1858: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. This government cannot permanently endure half slave and half free." By such teaching,