Address of President Roosevelt at the Lincoln dinner of the Republican club of the city of New York, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, February 13, 1905

Transcriber’s Note: The cover image was created from the decorative cover and title page by the transcriber, and is placed in the public domain.
WASHINGTON GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1905

Mr. President, and you, my fellow-members of the Republican Club, and you, my fellow-guests of the Republican Club:
In his second inaugural, in a speech which will be read as long as the memory of this nation endures, Abraham Lincoln closed by saying:
“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 do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”
Immediately after his reelection he had already spoken thus:
“The strife of the election is but human nature practically applied to the facts of the case. What has occurred in this case must ever recur in similar cases. Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged. May not all having a common interest reunite in a common effort to (serve) our common country? For my own part, I have striven and shall strive to avoid placing any obstacle in the way. So long as I have been here I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom. While I am deeply sensible to the high compliment of a reelection, and duly grateful, as I trust, to Almighty God for having directed my countrymen to a right conclusion, as I think, for their own good, it adds nothing to my satisfaction that any other man may be disappointed or pained by the result.
“May I ask those who have not differed with me to join with me in this same spirit toward those who have?”
We of to-day, in dealing with all our fellow-citizens, white or colored, North or South, should strive to show just the qualities that Lincoln showed: His steadfastness in striving after the right, and his infinite patience and forbearance with those who saw that right less clearly than he did; his earnest endeavor to do what was best, and yet his readiness to accept the best that was practicable when the ideal best was unattainable; his unceasing effort to cure what was evil, coupled with his refusal to make a bad situation worse by any ill-judged or ill-timed effort to make it better.