FATHER ABRAHAM.
Just one hundred and nine years ago this coming February 12, there was born, in what was then the backwoods of Kentucky, the man whose career is most symbolic of the equality of opportunity afforded by our common country. By dint of hard work, laboring under the spell of poverty and of discouraging surroundings, Abraham Lincoln made himself fit to be nominated for and twice elected to the highest office within the gift of his countrymen. Not only that; he so qualified himself that he brought his country safely through the period which, next to the present one, proved to be the most crucial in its entire history.
He accomplished that tremendous task largely by the exercise of the most trying—and, to those who do not possess it, the most exasperating—of all the virtues: Patience. Patience which, moreover, was coupled with a rare sense of homely humor. When pettifogging scandal-mongers sneaked up to him with tales that Grant, his most successful commander, was drinking to excess, he merely smiled; said he wished he knew the brand of whisky Grant used, so he could try it on some of his other generals; kept Grant in command (for he had his own sources of information as to the general's conduct), and held his peace, trusting to time to vindicate his judgment, as it did amply.
Then, too, in his relations with the Copperheads, the pacifists of that day, who would have, as Horace Greeley put it, "let the erring sisters depart in peace," Lincoln practiced patience—patience mixed with a keen appreciation of the humorous side of their frantic meanderings. Through all the dark days of those long four years he kept his poise, kept his head, kept his nation straight in the true course; and yet, wracked with anxiety, battered by critics, he found time to laugh, and to show others the way to laugh.
Every American, at home or over here, would do well to take deep thought, on this coming anniversary, of what manner of man was "the prairie lawyer, master of us all." In spite of reverses to his armies, in spite of such criticism as never before or since was leveled at the head of a President, in spite of personal bereavement, in spite of the captiousness of his own chosen advisors, he saw his task through. To-day a united nation, united because he made it possible to be so, stands again in battle array to vindicate the principle which he held most dear: "That government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
It is our privilege, and our glory, as members of America's vanguard of liberty, so to fight, so to strive, that we may rightly be called the fellow countrymen of Father Abraham.