From the cabin on Nolin to the White House in Washington he expressed and embodied the life of the nation.

Lincoln was born in the South, but we do not think of him as a southerner. He directed the armies of the North, but we do not think of him as a northerner. He fought the war without hate, and he never cherished sectional jealousy or bigotry. The South had no truer friend; the spirit of unified nationalism had no finer or worthier exponent.

America makes high profession of faith when she claims Abraham Lincoln as the norm and exponent of her national life. The manhood of a nation that claims Lincoln should be clean, upright, honest, patriotic, sympathetic, magnanimous, noble. Can America make this claim for her manhood? It is her clear duty and her high privilege to aspire that this shall be true. She has a right to tell to her youth the story of Lincoln, and to teach her young manhood to emulate his simple virtues. She has a right to hang his portrait on the walls of her legislative halls and her courts of justice. She has a right to name him in her intercourse with other nations. She has a right to define her own principles in terms of his integrity and transparent righteousness. America that produced Abraham Lincoln can beget other sons in his likeness and train them up in his spirit. It will be a proud day for our country when other nations think of him, and believe that Americans are like him and that America is filled with his spirit. His name unifies America.

VII. ABRAHAM LINCOLN, WORLD CITIZEN

A nation divided against itself, into ignorant and educated, righteous and unrighteous, can not stand. We must educate and elevate all our people and make the rule of the people something else than the rule of the mob. A world divided against itself can not stand. It can not endure half armed and half unarmed, half peaceable and half militaristic. It can not endure with one half cherishing hatred and contempt and suspicion against the

other half. The world must learn a basis of self-government in righteousness. The world is just beginning to believe this; and that is one reason why the name of Abraham Lincoln is being honored in meetings for international good will, not in America only, but throughout the earth.

Democracy in America is more than a form of government; it is a confession of faith in the moral character of the universe. It is a philosophy of life, and the expression of a hope for the future of the human race. This is why, spite of all the unpleasant and self-assertive forms in which Americans have flouted their noisy patriotism in the face of other peoples, the world has an ever growing affection and respect for the character of Abraham Lincoln. England claims him by right of his descent, and the free nations of the world claim him by reason of the kinship they discover in his spirit. There is little danger that his fame will grow less; it is as certain as anything future can well be that it will grow from more to more until it is loved and honored the whole world around.

The personality of Abraham Lincoln grows dim with the flight of years. The last man who saw and knew him will soon be dead. A halo about his personality refracts the light of calm judgment. Already he is in good part a mythical character. To him are attributed many utterances which have no place in his writings or speeches. Concerning him are current past any hope of eradication incidents which never occurred or in which he had no part. Poetry and song and the myth-making tendency of the human mind are all at work, and have been at work for half a century. But only a mighty man could thus have been idealized. If the outline of his personality grows dim in the mists of the decades, his figure bulks big and regal. We measure his stature by the shadow which he casts; it is nothing less than colossal. And the crest of his character is the dignity of his moral grandeur.

Men whom the world counts great have been conveniently grouped into three classes-those who are born great, those who

attain to greatness, and those who have greatness thrust upon them. The first two groups may in reality be one-those who, born with inherent qualities of greatness, attain to its realization and recognition by their own innate power, and its fortunate adaptation to opportunity. When a truly great man becomes the advocate of a great cause, and meets a great situation adequately, worthily and triumphantly, the patient ages rise from their somnolence and rejoice.

Those men who have greatness thrust upon them live not long in the rarified atmosphere to which they are suddenly elevated. They must die soon or they outlive their fame. Some of them, fortunately caught by death in the brief hour of their publicity, are impulsively enrolled among the notable men of their generation; but even so, they lengthen but little the period in which they are accounted notable. Die they soon or die they late, their fame fades, and they pass in due time to their own place in oblivion.

But they who, being great, match their quality against the challenging front of opportunity, achieve a distinction which grows toward immortality. Like snow-capped mountains hidden at close view by their own foot-hills, and emerging to appear at first only as slightly higher elevations in the range, they tower more loftily as the years recede, dwarfing all lesser hills of their contemporaries, until they stand in solitary grandeur. While the plain is yet dark, they greet with radiant crest the dawn of succeeding generations. Of these, greatest of all men of his generation was Abraham Lincoln.

THE END

APPENDIX

I. CORPORAL TANNER'S ACCOUNT OF THE DEATH OF LINCOLN

Perhaps the only man now living who was in the Peterson house on the night of Lincoln's assassination is Honorable James Tanner, to whom reference is made in the text of this volume. His account, written on Sunday, April 17, 1865, has recently been printed in the American Historical Review from which I quote. The foot-notes are by Professor J. Franklin Jameson.*

THE following letter, now in the possession of Mr. Hadley H. Walch, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, son of the man to whom it was addressed, was brought to the attention of the Review by Professor C. H. Van Tyne. The writer, Honorable James Tanner, now residing in Washington, where since 1904 he has been register of wills for the District of Columbia, kindly consents to its publication. Born in 1844, Mr. Tanner enlisted early in the Civil War in the 87th New York Volunteers, and lost both legs at the second battle of Bull Run.

In 1864 [he writes] I attended Ames's Business College, Syracuse, New York, for the purpose of studying shorthand. Hadley F. Walch, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, was a fellow student of shorthand and we kept up a desultory acquaintance for some years. That winter of '64 I came to Washington to take a clerkship in the War Department. Walch continued his study and perfected himself in shorthand and was for many years, I think, reporter in the courts at Grand Rapids, Michigan.†

Mr. Tanner remembers writing the letter to Walch. On the same day or the day preceding he wrote to his mother a long let

*Vol. XXIX, April 1924, pp. 514.17.

†Mr. Walch occupied that position from 1869 till his death in 1920.