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EUGENE HALE—ALBERT J. MEYER. 297

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E was not only the head of an administration which shaped events the mightiest of the century, but its balance-wheel also. The American people owe it to him that the important steps in the war for the preservation of the Union were taken just at the fitting

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ADDRESS ON THE BATTLE-FIELD OF

GETTYSBURG,

NOVEMBER 19, 1863.

FOURSCORE and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting-place of those who here. gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

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But, in a larger sense, 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. for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on. 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 the cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vainthat the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

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Representing three artillerymen, one, an officer standing on a dismounted cannon in an attitnde of defiance, while below him is a prostrate soldier, wounded by the same shot that disabled his gun, and a boy in an attitude of sympathy and horror, springing forward as if to succor his wounded comrade.

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REAT men are divinely called to great missions. As certainly as God called Abraham to be the human founder of his church, or Moses to lead his people out of bondage into liberty, or "girded" Cyrus for his beneficent work, though unknown by that famous commander, or commissioned Paul to be the leader of an evangelistic host, to open the gates of gospel day to heathen nations, or inspired Luther and Wesley to rekindle the fires of religion on the altars of a faithless church, so certainly does it appear to thoughtful minds that he called Abraham Lincoln to rise from the log-cabin in the wilderness, through difficulties and obstacles that would have appalled a weaker man, to take the helm of the new American nation in its crisis hour, to strike the shackles from an enslaved race, and thence to ascend to a victor's throne and a martyr's crown.

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