"'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.'
"The men who knew Abraham Lincoln, who saw him face to face, who met him upon our streets, and heard his voice in our public assemblages have, with few exceptions, passed to the grave. Another generation is upon the busy stage. The book has forever closed upon the dread pageant of civil strife. Sectional animosities, thank God, belong now only to the past. The mantle of peace is over our entire land, and prosperity within all our borders.
"'Till the war-drum throbs no longer,
And the battle-flags are furled
In the parliament of man,
The federation of the world.'
"Through the instrumentality in no small measure of the man personally known to some who hear me, the man McLean County delighted to honor, no less as a private citizen than as President, this Government, untouched by the finger of time, has descended to us. Let it never be forgotten that the responsibility of its preservation and transmission will rest upon the successive generations of his countrymen, as they shall come and go.
"Truly it has been said: 'To-day is the pupil of yesterday,' and also 'History is the great teacher of human nature by means of object-lessons drawn from the whole recorded life of human nature.' There is, then, no dead past. Every event is in a measure significant. The annals of the ambitions, the crimes, the miseries, the wrongs, the struggles, the achievements of men in the long past are fraught with lessons of deep import to all succeeding generations. Each age is the heir to that which preceded. We make progress in proportion as we wisely ponder significant events.
"McLean County had its historical beginning as a dependent but distinct political organization on the joyous Christmas Day of 1830. Stretching backward from that date, its history is bound up solely in that of Illinois, under its various organizations and names. A brief time upon occasion such as this given to a hurried review of the masterful epochs in the history of the great State of which our own county is so important a part, cannot be wholly misspent.
"Bearing in mind that 'that which comes after ever conforms to that which has gone before,' significant events of the past must be known, to the end that we intelligently comprehend the present, and are enabled, even in scant measure, to forecast the future.
"No State of the American union has a history of more intense interest than our own. Its early chapters, indeed, savor of the romantic rather than of the real. I do not speak of the long-ago time when Illinois forest and prairie were the house and hunting-ground of the red men, and his frail bark the only craft known to its rivers. That period belongs to the border-land age of tradition rather than of veritable history. It is of Illinois under the domination of civilized men I would speak.
"For near a century preceding the Treaty of Paris in 1763, 'the Illinois country' was a part of the French domain. Inseparably linked with that portion of its history are names that will live with those of the Cabots and Columbus. The great navigator in his lonely search for a new pathway to the Indies was buoyed by a courage, a yearning for discovery, scarce greater than that which in the heart of the new continent sustained the later voyagers and discoverers, Marquette, Joliet, Hennepin, and La Salle.
"America's obligation to France is enduring—for explorers in the seventeenth century no less than for defenders in that which immediately followed. The historic page which tells of the lofty heroism of Lafayette has for us no deeper interest than that which records the daring achievements of the early French pathfinders and voyagers. Two centuries and a half ago Marquette and Joliet, bearing the commission of the French Governor of Quebec, embarked upon their expedition for the discovery of new countries to the southward. Animated by the earnest desire of extending the blessings of religion no less than that of adding to the domain of their imperial master, they set out upon an expedition which has become historic. The bare recital of what befell them would fill volumes. Now meeting with the scattered tribes of Indians, bestowing presents and in turn sharing the hospitality offered; now speaking words of admonition and of instruction; now gathering up the crude materials for history; now reverently setting up the cross in the wilderness; again threading the pathless forests, or in frail barks sailing unknown waters, they pursued their perilous journey.