In a new country, a man must possess at least three virtues honesty, courage, and generosity.

In a new country, character is essential; in the old, reputation is sufficient. In the new, they find what a man really is; in the old, he generally passes for what he resembles.

Lincoln never finished his education. To the night of his death he was a pupil, a learner, an inquirer, a seeker after knowledge.

Lincoln was a many-sided man, acquainted with smiles and tears, complex in brain, single in heart. He was never afraid to ask never too dignified to admit that he did not know. No man had keener wit or kinder humor.

He had intellect without arrogance, genius without pride, and religion without cant that is to say, without bigotry and without deceit.

He was an orator clear, sincere, natural.

If you wish to know the difference between an orator and an elocutionist - between what is felt and what is said-between what the heart and brain can do together and what the brain can do alone — read Lincoln's wondrous speech at Gettysburg, and then the oration of Edward Everett. The speech of Lincoln will never be forgotten. It will live until languages are dead and lips are dust.

Wealth could not purchase, power could not awe, this divine, this loving man.

He knew no fear except the fear of doing wrong. Hating slavery, pitying the master-seeking to conquer, not persons, but prejudices, he was the embodiment of the self-denial, the courage, the hope, and the nobility of a Nation.

He spoke, not to inflame, not to upbraid, but to convince.

He raised his hands, not to strike, but in benediction. He longed to pardon.

He loved to see the pearls of joy on the cheeks of a wife whose husband he had rescued from death. Lincoln was the grandest figure of the fiercest civil He is the gentlest memory of our world.

war.

LINCOLN'S BIRTHPLACE1

WOODROW WILSON (1856

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 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 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

1 From an address delivered on the occasion of the acceptance by the War Department of the gift to the nation of the Lincoln birthplace farm at Hodgenville, Kentucky, September, 4, 1916. In official pamphlet printed by the Government Printing Office, 1916.

presently emerged upon the great stage of the nation's 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 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? 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 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 and of

reassurance.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN 1

TOM TAYLOR (1817-1880)

You lay a wreath on murdered LINCOLN's bier,
You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace
Broad for the self-complacent British sneer

His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face,

His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair, His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease;

His lack of all we prize as debonair,

Of

power or will to shine, of art to please.

You, whose smart pen backed up the pencil's laugh,
Judging each step, as though the way were plain;
Reckless, so it could point its paragraph

Of chief's perplexity, or people's pain.

Beside this corpse, that bears for winding-sheet
The Stars and Stripes he lived to rear anew,
Between the mourners at his head and feet,
Say, scurril jester, is there room for you?

1 Tom Taylor, an English critic and dramatist, was a frequent contributor, during the war of secession, to London Punch, of which he later became editor. He was the author of "Our American Cousin," in which the elder Sothern made his mark as Lord Dundreary, the comic Englishman. This was the play on the stage at Ford's Theatre when Lincoln was assassinated. In the early years of the war Taylor had often ridiculed Lincoln in the London weekly, but expressed his change of feeling in this poem, which accompanied a picture by John Tenniel, representing Britannia laying a wreath upon the bier of Lincoln.

From the original poem in London Punch, May 6, 1865.

Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer,
To lame my pencil, and confute my pen
To make me own this hind of princes peer,
This rail-splitter a true-born king of men.

My shallow judgment I had learnt to rue,
Noting how to occasion's height he rose,

How his quaint wit made home-truth seem more true,
How, iron-like, his temper grew by blows.

How humble yet how hopeful he could be:
How in good fortune and in ill the same:
Nor bitter in success, nor boastful he,

Thirsty for gold, nor feverish for fame.

He went about his work such work as few
Ever had laid on head and heart and hand
As one who knows, where there's a task to do,

Man's honest will must Heaven's good grace command;

Who trusts the strength will with the burden grow,

That God makes instruments to work His will,

If but that will we can arrive to know,

Nor tamper with the weights of good and ill.

So he went forth to battle, on the side

That he felt clear was Liberty's and Right's,

As in his peasant boyhood he had plied

His warfare with rude Nature's thwarting mights

The uncleared forest, the unbroken soil,

The iron bark, that turns the lumberer's ax;

The rapid, that o'erbears the boatman's toil,

The prairie, hiding the mazed wanderer's tracks,