NOTES AND QUESTIONS

Biographical and Historical Note. Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), the sixteenth President of the United States, was born on a farm near Hodgensville, Kentucky. When he was seven years old, the Lincoln family moved to Indiana, and in 1830 to Illinois. Lincoln's boyhood was full of hardships and privation. He was able to attend school only a few months altogether, but he had a small number of good books, which he read again and again. By hard struggles he educated himself, became a lawyer, a member of Congress, and in 1860 was elected President. He was assassinated by an actor named Booth, April 14, 1865. There are many memorials to Lincoln: the farm where he was born was presented to the nation in 1916; the Abraham Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C., stands in Potomac Park, near the shore of the Potomac River; there is a beautiful monument in Springfield, Illinois, where he is buried; a national highway crossing the continent from east to west has been named the Lincoln Highway; one of the most famous statues of Lincoln is the one made by Saint Gaudens which stands in Lincoln Park, Chicago.

Lincoln was asked to be present and to say a few words at the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863. Contrary to his prediction, the world has "noted and remembered" what he said on that occasion. Like all his writings, the address shows intense thought and feeling expressed in simple words. Edward Everett, who delivered the oration of the day, wrote to Mr. Lincoln, "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes."

Discussion. 1. In a speech delivered in Independence Hall in 1861, just before he became President, Mr. Lincoln said, "I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. . . . It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the motherland, but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but I hope, to the world, for all future time." What is the sentence in the Declaration of Indpendence to which Lincoln refers? 2. What sentiment in the poem, "In Flanders Fields," is similar to one expressed by Lincoln in the last paragraph? 3. What punctuation would help to bring out the meaning that a government of the people is a government by and for the people? 4. Draw from the library and bring to class "Lincoln's Gettysburg Address," Century Magazine, February, 1894; note Lincoln's handwriting and compare the three versions of the address, Lincoln's first draft, the Associated Press report, and Lincoln's revised autograph copy. 5. Is there anything in this address that you can apply to the World War? 6. Library reading: Mary R. S. Andrews's "The Perfect Tribute"; Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain."

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

WOODROW WILSON

No more significant memorial could have been presented to the nation than this. It expresses so much of what is singular and noteworthy in the history of the country; it suggests so many of the things that we prize most highly in our life and in our system of government. How eloquent this little house within. this shrine is of the vigor of democracy! There is nowhere in the land any home so remote, so humble, that it may not contain the power of mind and heart and conscience to which nations yield and history submits its processes. Nature pays no tribute to 10 aristocracy, subscribes to no creed of caste, renders fealty to no monarch or master of any name or kind. Genius is no snob. It does not run after titles or seek by preference the high circles of society. It affects humble company as well as great. It pays no special tribute to universities or learned societies or conventional 15 standards of greatness, but serenely chooses its own comrades, its own haunts, its own cradle even, and its own life of adventure and of training. Here is proof of it. This little hut was the cradle of one of the great sons of men, a man of singular, delightful, vital genius who presently emerged upon the great stage of the nation's 20 history, gaunt, shy, ungainly, but dominant and majestic, a natural ruler of men, himself inevitably the central figure of the great plot. No man can explain this, but every man can see how it demonstrates the vigor of democracy, where every door is open, in every hamlet and countryside, in city and wilderness 25 alike, for the ruler to emerge when he will and claim his leadership in the free life. Such are the authentic proofs of the validity and vitality of democracy.

Here, no less, hides the mystery of democracy. Who shall guess this secret of nature and providence and a free polity? 30 Whatever the vigor and vitality of the stock from which he sprang, its mere vigor and soundness do not explain where this man got his great heart that seemed to comprehend all mankind in its catholic and benignant sympathy, the mind that sat enthroned

behind those brooding, melancholy eyes, whose vision swept many an horizon which those about him dreamed not of-that mind that comprehended what it had never seen, and understood the language of affairs with the ready ease of one to the manner 5 born-or that nature which seemed in its varied richness to be the familiar of men of every way of life. This is the sacred mystery of democracy; that its richest fruits spring up out of soils which no man has prepared and in circumstances amidst which they are the least expected. This is a place alike of mystery 10 and of reassurance.

It is likely that in a society ordered otherwise than our own Lincoln could not have found himself or the path of fame and power upon which he walked serenely to his death. In this place it is right that we should remind ourselves of the solid and strik15 ing facts upon which our faith in democracy is founded. Many another man besides Lincoln has served the nation in its highest places of counsel and of action whose origins were as humble as his. Though the greatest example of the universal energy, richness, stimulation, and force of democracy, he is only one example 20 among many. The permeating and all-pervasive virtue of the freedom which challenges us in America to make the most of every gift and power we possess, every page of our history serves to emphasize and illustrate. Standing here in this place, it seems almost the whole of the stirring story.

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Here Lincoln had his beginnings. Here the end and consummation of that great life seem remote and a bit incredible. And yet there was no break anywhere between beginning and end, no lack of natural sequence anywhere. Nothing really incredible happened. Lincoln was unaffectedly as much at home in the 30 White House as he was here. Do you share with me the feeling, I wonder, that he was permanently at home nowhere? It seems to me that in the case of a man-I would rather say of a spiritlike Lincoln the question where he was is of little significance, that it is always what he was that really arrests our thought and 35 takes hold of our imagination. It is the spirit always that is sovereign. Lincoln, like the rest of us, was put through the discipline of the world-a very rough and exacting discipline for him,

an indispensable discipline for every man who would know what he is about in the midst of the world's affairs; but his spirit got only its schooling there. It did not derive its character or its vision from the experiences which brought it to its full revelation. The test of every American must always be, not where he is, but what he is. That, also, is of the essence of democracy, and is the moral of which this place is most gravely expressive.

We would like to think of men like Lincoln and Washington 10 as typical Americans, but no man can be typical who is so unusual as these great men were. It was typical of American life that it should produce such men with supreme indifference as to the manner in which it produced them, and as readily here in this hut as amidst the little circle of cultivated gentlemen to whom 15 Virginia owed so much in leadership and example. And Lincoln and Washington were typical Americans in the use they made of their genius. But there will be few such men at best, and we will not look into the mystery of how and why they come. We will only keep the door open for them always, and a hearty wel20 come-after we have recognized them.

I have read many biographies of Lincoln; I have sought out with the greatest interest the many intimate stories that are told of him, the narratives of near-by friends, the sketches at close quarters, in which those who had the privilege of being associated 25 with him have tried to depict for us the very man himself "in his habit as he lived"; but I have nowhere found a real intimate of Lincoln's. I nowhere get the impression in any narrative or reminiscence that the writer had in fact penetrated to the heart of his mystery, or that any man could penetrate to the heart of it. so That brooding spirit had no real familiars. I get the impression that it never spoke out in complete self-revelation, and that it could not reveal itself completely to anyone. It was a very lonely spirit that looked out from underneath those shaggy brows and comprehended men without fully communing with them, as 35 if, in spite of all its genial efforts at comradeship, it dwelt apart, saw its visions of duty where no man looked on. There is a very holy and very terrible isolation for the conscience of every man

who seeks to read the destiny in affairs for others as well as for himself, for a nation as well as for individuals. That privacy no man can intrude upon. That lonely search of the spirit for the right perhaps no man can assist. This strange child of the cabin 5 kept company with invisible things, was born into no intimacy but that of his own silently assembling and deploying thoughts.

I have come here today, not to utter a eulogy on Lincoln; he stands in need of none, but to endeavor to interpret the meaning of this gift to the nation of the place of his birth and origin. Is 10 not this an altar upon which we may forever keep alive the vestal fire of democracy as upon a shrine at which some of the deepest and most sacred hopes of mankind may from age to age be rekindled? For these hopes must constantly be rekindled and only those who live can rekindle them. The only stuff that 15 can retain the life-giving heat is the stuff of living hearts. And the hopes of mankind cannot be kept alive by words merely, by constitutions and doctrines of right and codes of liberty. The object of democracy is to transmute these into the life and action of society, the self-denial and self-sacrifice of heroic men and 20 women willing to make their lives an embodiment of right and service and enlightened purpose. The commands of democracy are as imperative as its privileges and opportunities are wide and generous. Its compulsion is upon us. It will be great and lift a great light for the guidance of the nations only if we are 25 great and carry that light high for the guidance of our own feet. We are not worthy to stand here unless we ourselves be in deed and in truth real democrats and servants of mankind, ready to give our very lives for the freedom and justice and spiritual exaltation of the great nation which shelters and nurtures us.