GETTYSBURG ADDRESS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, DELIVERED AT THE DEDICATION OF THE CEMETERY AT GETTYSBURG, NOVEMBER 19,

1863.

[ABRAHAM LINCOLN, the sixteenth President of the United States, was born in a log cabin in Hardin County, Kentucky, Feb. 12, 1809. His father, Thomas Lincoln, was descended from a Quaker family of English origin. His mother, Nancy Hanks, was Thomas Lincoln's first wife. His early life was one of poverty and struggle. When he became of age, soon after the family moved to Illinois in 1830, he left home and engaged in various occupations. He was admitted to the bar in 1836, and began the practice of the law in Springfield in the following year. As Captain and after

wards as a Private he served in the Black Hawk War in 1832. In 1834 he was elected a Whig member of the Illinois State Legislature, and Whig member of congress from Illinois in 1847. As Republican candidate for the Senate in 1858 he debated the all-important question of the constitutionality of slavery with Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic Candidate. This discussion attracted the attention of the country, and in 1860 he was nominated as candidate for the Presidency by the Republican party, and elected by an easy majority, as against John C. Breckenridge and Stephen A. Douglas, candidates for the Northern and Southern Democrats, and was inaugurated on March 4, 1861. His election was the signal for the secession of the slave states, one after another, and for the formation of the Confederacy. The country was plunged into Civil War, when the first gun was fired on Fort Sumpter by the Secessionists of North Carolina, April 12, 1861. On the 15th the President issued a call for 75,000 volunteers, and on the 19th proclaimed a blockade of the Southern ports. On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a proclamation emancipating all slaves in states or parts of states which should still be in rebellion on Jan. 1, 1863. He was re-elected President by the Republican Party in 1864, as against Geo. B. McClellan, candidate for the Democratic party, and began his second term of office March 4, 1865. Lincoln entered Richmond at the head of the Federal Army April 4, following the flight of the Confederate Government. In the midst of his activities for the reconstruction of the South he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre, Washington, April 14, 1865, and died the following day.]

"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 battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for 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 con

secrate, 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 government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

THE CHARACTER OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

BY ROBERT G. INGERSOLL.

AFTER a brief sketch of the early life of Abraham Lincoln, and of the crisis which the United States of America was facing in 1866, Robert Ingersoll says:

"From the heights of philosophy-standing above the contending hosts, above the prejudices, the sentimentalities of the day Lincoln was great enough and brave enough and wise enough to utter these prophetic words:

"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this Government cannot permanently endure half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all the one thing or the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it further until it becomes alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.'

"This declaration was the standard around which gathered the grandest political party the world has ever seen, and this declaration made Lincoln the leader of that vast host. In this, the first great crisis, Lincoln uttered the victorious truth that made him the foremost man in the Republic.

"The Republican party nominated him for the Presidency and the people decided at the polls that a house divided against itself could not stand, and that slavery had cursed soul and soil enough.

"It is not a common thing to elect a really great man to fill the highest official position. I do not say that the great Presidents have been chosen by accident. Probably it would be better to say that they were the favorites of a happy chance. The average man is afraid of genius. He feels as an awkward man feels in the presence of a sleight-of-hand performer. He admires and suspects. Genius appears to carry too much sail - to lack prudence, has too much courage. The ballast of dullness inspires confidence. By a happy chance Lincoln was nominated and elected in spite of his fitness - and the patient, gentle, just and loving man was called upon to bear as great a burden as man has ever borne.

"Then came another crisis the crisis of Secession and Civil War. Again Lincoln spoke the deepest feeling and the highest thought of the Nation. In his first message he said:

"The central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.' He also showed conclusively that the North and South, in spite of secession, must remain face to face that physically they could not separate that they must have more or less commerce, and that this commerce must be carried on either between the two sections as friends, or as aliens. This situation and its consequences he pointed out to absolute perfection in these words:

"Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws among friends?'

"After having stated fully and fairly the philosophy of the conflict, after having said enough to satisfy any calm and thoughtful mind, he addressed himself to the hearts of Amer