or morality, but are equal in the eyes of the law, entitled to equal justice and equal opportunity. This interpretation of Jefferson's meaning when he wrote the Declaration is the one generally accepted.] We are now a mighty nation: we are thirty, or about thirty, millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years, and we discover that we were then a very small people, in point of numbers vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly less extent of country, with vastly less of everything we deem desirable among men. We look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away back as in some way or other being connected with this rise of prosperity. We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men; they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity which we now enjoy has come to us. We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time, of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves we feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men, in the age, and race, and country in which we live, for these celebrations. But after we have done all this, we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have, besides these men descended by blood from our ancestors - among us, perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men; they are men who have come from Europe, German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian, men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equal in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none; they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us; but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence, they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the man who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world. "BACK TO THE DECLARATION" ABRAHAM LINCOLN [From a speech at Lewiston, Illinois, August 17, 1858. Lincoln was then in the midst of his famous campaign for the senatorship against Judge Stephen A. Douglas, who had been nominated by the Democratic party as its candidate. This heated campaign, which drew crowds throughout Illinois, soon attracted the attention of the nation. From this contest Lincoln emerged as a national figure. Douglas won the senatorship, but Lincoln two years later was nominated and elected President of the United States. It was this campaign that brought slavery to the center of the political stage. The law known as the Missouri Compromise had restricted slavery to the south of Mason and Dixon's line. When this law was repealed in 1854, the way was open for the extension of slavery everywhere. Lincoln led the newly-formed Republican party against this extension. He stated the issue in the following words: "A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." He set his face against the extension of slavery because he thought a free government the best government. He thought that if slavery could be restricted, it would gradually die out. He did not at this time contemplate the forcible abolition of slavery. That came about through the storm and stress of civil war.] THE Declaration of Independence was formed by the representatives of American liberty from thirteen States of the confederacy. . . . These communities, by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to his creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all his creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children, and their children's children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, or none but Anglo-Saxon white men, were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began, so that truth and justice and mercy and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land, so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built. Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the revolution. Think nothing of me take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever - but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. While pretending no indifference to earthly honors, I do claim to be actuated in this contest by something higher than any anxiety for office. I charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for any man's success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity the Declaration of American Independence. GETTYSBURG SPEECH ABRAHAM LINCOLN [The Gettysburg national cemetery was dedicated on November II, 1863. The formal oration of the day was made by Edward Everett. It is little read or known to-day. Lincoln spoke very briefly, but his speech is widely quoted and praised. He himself thought poorly of it. At the time he remarked to a friend: "It is a flat failThe people won't like it." Everett knew better. The next day he wrote to Lincoln: “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes."] ure. FOURSCORE and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on 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 have come 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. 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 poor 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 the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. TO A MOTHER WHO LOST FIVE SONS ABRAHAM LINCOLN [Letter to Mrs. Bixby; written November 21, 1864.] Dear Madam: I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to be |