through which the growing life of the nation could be incorporated into this bill of rights. It may be said that the Convention which framed the charter of American liberty and devised the means for legislation, adjudication, and administration to make liberty effective as law, merely modelled the dead material. It was the Supreme Court that breathed into it the spirit of life. That instrument, like all that comes from the hand of man, was not perfect. It was the child of compromise and concession. It left unsettled a very important issue. Was the United States a mere federation of sovereign States or did the States derive their sovereignty from that of the Nation?

This perplexity would not have been fraught with grave peril, had not, at the same time, the legacy of slavery been left to the young Republic. Soon after the birth of the United States, the harvest of this original sin began to ripen. Forty years of wandering in the wilderness, compromise, and temporizing retarded the entrance into the Promised Land of peace. Passions and distrusts, not the cloud of God nor the pillar of divine light by night, decided the route. In New England first, the old Puritan found its voice of protest. It woke a ready echo in the young West. When Lincoln made his bow on the stage of public and political life, slavery and its extension into new territory was dividing the people, and keeping the public mind at fever heat. His elevation to the presidency sent the nation into the valley of decision, a valley which at times took on the terrible aspect of the "valley of the shadow of death." Statesman Lincoln had defined his position clearly in the historic debates with Douglas. Not a politician of thé modern cast, but one of the old mould, knowing that party is a means to an end and patriotism must sanctify partisanship, he spoke out when silence and ambiguity might have been personally more profitable for him. "A house divided against itself cannot stand"-this prediction cost him the senatorship, but won him the presidency. And yet when the responsibility of the high trust was laid on him, to many he seemed, all of a sudden, to be struck with hesitating indecision. The Abolitionists were not

slow to utter their bitter impatience. In his biding his time he displayed his mastership as a statesman. The deliberateness of his executive action reflects the sterling conservatism of his Americanism.

No other man ever ascended throne, or assumed the pilot's charge of the Ship of State, under more disheartening circumstances the nation cleft into two-the North, not a united band, to support him-the enemy prepared, the Union unequipped! Armies had to be created, navies had to be built, the treasury had to be filled, the finances put on a workable basis, the jealousy of the European nations to be disarmed and thwarted. Lincoln had loyal helpers, men of genius and of eminent power of organization. Yet his was the supreme responsibility. He, the man of tender, sympathetic heart, had to give the word that sent thousands to their death, millions into the furnace of fire. No wonder that his face assumed an expression of deep sadness. It seemed as though in the lines of his brow, in the look of his eyes, were symbolized all the pathos of those four years of doubt and daring, of suffering and striving. Republics are never so well armored for the bloody business of war as are autocracies. Where the king's will is the supreme law, the petty bickerings among the chieftains are soon hushed. Not so in a Republic. Coöperation among the various commanders is much more difficult to secure. With all this and worse, Lincoln had to contend. He bore his cross cheerfully, for he had an abiding faith in the destiny of his nation, a wonderful confidence in the loyalty of the common people. What share he had in directing to final and glorious victory the engine of war, what his part in the financing of the gigantic combat, what inspiration came from him in the work of keeping the European detractors of our liberty at bay, we know better than they that lived through those terrible years of suspense and darkness. Latest memoirs of the chief actors in this stupendous drama have thrown onto the screen the astounding certainty that this country-bred, lank, lean lawyer proved to be a strategist of no mean calibre, a financier of high resourcefulness, a diplomat of wide outlook. He was a statesman who has had,

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