was a man of moral integrity and of sublime unselfishness.

How warm were his sympathies with the suffering and how delicately he could phrase them upon occasion! Read this letter written to Mrs. Byxbee, the mother of the five sons who had given their lives to the cause of the Union:

"I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement 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 beguile you from your grief for a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation which may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and the

lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."

How deeply religious the man was in all the essential attitudes of his spirit! His closing words in the Second Inaugural might, in their sweep and finish, in their moral tone and their spiritual insight, have come from one of the greatest of the old Hebrew prophets.

"Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsmen's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right-let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."

In discussing these elements of Lincoln's greatness I have not paused at each point to make comparison between him and the other great men of that period. He would easily bear comparison with the greatest men of the century. Napoleon was a great man and a large part of his life came in the Nineteenth Century. But the growing verdict upon him is that he was selfish, cruel, and in his domestic relations absolutely heartless. Lincoln was as tender-hearted as a woman. Goethe

was a great writer,-I believe the greatest writer of the Nineteenth Century,—but his private life was not clean. His warmest admirers are compelled to apologize for certain phases of his conduct and character. Lincoln's life was clean-the American people will never have to blush for Abraham Lincoln. Darwin and Spencer were great men, but great chiefly because of their association with a certain idea, the idea of organic evolution which was about to be announced by another investigator, Wallace. The greatness lay in the idea rather than in the personalities of these two men. Somehow Lincoln combined the intellectual, the administrative, and the moral in such a degree that nowhere in the Nineteenth Century do I find any other man so truly great.

His combination of lofty idealism with practical sagacity in bringing things to pass; his ability to comprehend and in the end to utilize men of extreme views

by keeping to the front the deeper underlying principles and the main issues; his power of holding himself close to the hearts of the people in sympathetic fashion and yet of guiding them steadily and wisely in those lines of action he desired them to take; his political unselfishness and moral integrity-he invested these fine qualities in a momentous period of our nation's history and in the light of what he was and of what he did I am led to ascribe to him more of personal greatness and of abiding usefulness than belongs to any other man of the Nineteenth Century.

In this discussion I have tried to free my mind altogether from any partisan feeling or sectional prejudice 'or personal bias. I ought to be able to do this very readily. I come from the other side of Mason and Dixon's line-I was born in the old state of Virginia. My father believed in the Union, but his father, my