When that great road which patriotism has contemplated is completed between Washington. and Gettysburg, it has been proposed by a distinguished friend of mine who does not care for orations, that every so-called orator may be compelled to walk and meditate on the fall of oratory for the entire distance from the Capitol of the nation to that glorious place made so renowned in history of public speech by something which was more than an oration - the message of the greatest man of his time in the greatest hour of modern history, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address.

I wish to-night to accomplish another purpose than that attained by elegance of speech or brilliancy of portraiture. It is my desire simply and in the spirit which I hope the genius of Abraham Lincoln has given to us, to note something of the educational value of Lincoln's character and career in the republic. And, not vainly to recur to what I have said, one of the very first things which I think needs to be considered with reference to this matter of public speech and Lincoln's total influence upon the American mind is here illustrated. I mean the excellence of his by-product. He was not a great orator of either the academic or popular type. Yet he has influenced American speech more than even Webster and Wendell Phillips. He has taught us the supremacy of character, the might of intellectual integrity, while he has shown that eloquence is the illumination of things true, lovely, and of good report, that the brain and heart and conscience of humanity need only this illumination to obey these divine behests; that the simple is the sublime; and that he who would be trusted to lead a whole people themselves made eloquent with a cause must himself be the mouthpiece of sound thinking, noble emotion, and unfailing conscience, whose messenger he is, and whose message when truly proclaimed is always eloquence.

Without detracting for an instant from the genius of Edward Everett, we often make the comparison between the oration of Edward Everett and the simple and sublime statements of our great President at the dedication of the Gettysburg battlefield. He was following then the fortunes of true Republicanism, of real Democracy, for the units of democracy - the material out of which republics are to be made and by which they are to be saved-these abide in the hearts, in the consciences, in the brains of all men; and after all they are most deeply obedient, not to the swift and splendid movement of the orator, but rather to the earnest, sincere progress in men, of reason, of love, and of a sound mind. The higher art which never knew an artifice in Lincoln's utterance will appear when the loftier arches of the temple of liberty and law shall spring upward from the granite bases of his address at Gettysburg. It has the immortal and republicanizing function abiding in his personality as a man of men and in his ideas and ideals which command all men.

Compare for a moment, my friends, the great orator, William Ewart Gladstone, with Abraham Lincoln. Ask to-night if there has been in the tide of human affairs a notable volume of utterance so certain to be forgotten by the coming student of those fundamental principles which create and re-create nationalities, as the magnificent eloquence of the great English Commoner. On the other hand, years as they pass make it clear that at the moment when the oratorical genius of Gladstone, the oratorical passion, as Bagehot tells us, which led him to see everything as material for his superb art, had seized this material and he stood in the House of Commons, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to say that Jefferson Davis had "created a new nation"-at that moment which was nearly fatal for his renown amongst the lovers of justice and liberty, he was only oratorical. Afterwards, when

he had, as he says, learned more of the safety of free government, his was often an eloquence so appaling and so clothed with the instinctive and prophetic vision of Lincoln that America is willing to hear again and again the praise he gave our Constitution, whose spirit was saved by Lincoln. When a moment has come which creates for the orator his pitfall, when the imagination and the fancy, and that fusion of thought and feeling, that radiancy of feeling over thought, have complete control of the mind; when all this gives to a Gladstone his intellectual and spiritual outlook, there stands at Washington, in all the certainty and light of his moral consciousness, a plain man, whose eminent contribution to the eloquence of mankind is not so much a critical personality, who, highly employed, disdains mere oratory, as a real messenger who is incarnating a message that must be made real and plain to the common people, whose interpreter and prophet also he is. Lincoln's attitude and temper were antimonarchial. He never dictated, nor was the national mind ever overborne or even dazzled by him. Here is a characteristic which inheres in our republicanism. The uncle of Washington stated it when he said to Washington as a young man, and he was right: "Avoid a dictatorial style." There is a human way of saying anything, and there is a way of saying the same thing which puts that same thing outside of the interest of an audience. This is of the unrepublican manner. It inheres in a despotic type of mind.

The oratory which announces itself, either when mounted upon the traditions of the past or some lonely eminence of genius, which is isolated from the experience of the public mind and imperious over it, has come with the history of monarchies, rather than republics. The oratory of republicanism never speaks at a man, hardly ever to a man, but always with a man. Such was

the eloquence of our greatest Republican, Abraham Lincoln.

The secret of Abraham Lincoln's power in speech lay in the educative value which he gave to the process of reasoning, the growth of conscience, the nourishing of noble emotion in the national consciousness. It was not a performance before men; it was not a conflict with men; it was an exciting within men of all generous impulses, the revealing within men of high and original vision, the emancipating and strengthening from within men of each man's unsuspected moral purpose, and the touching of strings of music within the human soul which the soul had never named to itself; and all the power of Abraham Lincoln in the creation of that new republic, which is a republic of thought and inspiration and high ideals, was manifested in the astonishing mental and moral utterances by which he simply gathered the manhood of his audience and gave it all back to his audience in fresh statement and winged power. In him, as he spoke, every man saw glorified that which every man had contributed out of his own soul to the great and revealing soul of the orator himself. As Abraham Lincoln enters his second century we see the same form and feature which have educated republican sentiment of the finest type and hope. There drift from the regions to which he has gone the same genial winds bearing fragrance and inspiration and music; but it is all a part of his essential republicanism. It is so near, so human; it so commands by persuading us of its excellence. No wonder is it that so many still seek to look like him or speak like him. In this many have been feeble and they have driveled, of course. As Lincoln has survived our oratory about him, so he passes on, having successfuly lived beyond the story teller. In it all, more and more, we behold a man without whose entire personality it is impossible to conceive of the greatest fortunes of the republic. So much an unit was he,

such an integral career was woven of one and the same texture, so constructed was his eminence of the constant and inviolable moral fibre, that we must have him all, and all of him, for our education.

The first ting that comes to a man interested in the education of the republic, it seems to me, is the emphasis which Lincoln's character and career gives to his early advantages, the advantages most of all likely to be possessed, if not at first enjoyed, by a majority of those that compose the republic-and by these I mean of course what he loved to call "the common people." I mean what he also called "the plain people." What were some of these advantages which were made such because they were and are of this kind of American, for Abraham Lincoln? They were mighty; they were all-powerful in the creation of his character. Goethe says that our greatest education is the education we give ourselves. Lincoln educated himself in the best of all schoolrooms, if one is seeking a fresh and fadeless sort of power. Nature-American nature - was his schoolhouse. Skies that bended over his head are our symbols of infinity. that ran close to his feet are yet filled with music. night and the clouds by day guided the mysterious fancies of his wondrous nature. They will guide ours, if we are willing. All the winds that came upon the cheek of this boy came with an influence that entered by thrilling sympathies into his thoughts and character. He gained, then and there, the most luminous, juicy and growing vocabulary which can come to any speaker. I mean the vocabulary of nature. He learned from nature, this great schoolroom, by such processes of growth as forebade him ever being satisfied with or misled by the machinations of the politicians or efforts of any to substitute machinery for growth in nation-building. Give a man nature in the early years and

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