The War Department appropriated five thousand dollars to cast this speech in bronze and set it up on the battlefield of Gettysburg. It is regarded as a masterpiece of dedication in the literature of the world.
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
“It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us: that from the same honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead should not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
III. THE MISSION OF AMERICA
The understanding person who becomes conscious of a meaning for his life, realizes a most important responsibility to work for the betterment of his mind and the material conditions that are to become as his future self. The moral person, who becomes conscious of a meaning for human life, works for this betterment as his contribution to the progress of posterity. This means that a moral individual coincides with a social humanity. Anything not thus harmonizing morally for the world as it is, in order to promote a world as it ought to be, is an enemy of both self and society.
Lincoln admonishes us to remember that “The struggle of today is not altogether for today,—it is for a vast future also.” We learned rapidly, when the true situation came into our view, that, as Professor Phelps voiced it long ago, “To save America we must save the world.” American patriotism is clearly world-patriotism, and it has become synonymous with humanity. This old truth was discovered by the Revolutionary Fathers, and it is the mission of America to make it the truth of the World.
The International Teachers’ Congress representing eighteen nations, which met at Liege in 1905, adopted five definite ideas of International Peace, that should be promoted through all available ways, in all the schools of civilized nations. Briefly stated, those fundamental ideas were as follows: