Search the world through and you will find no greater statue than this—the statue of Abraham Lincoln, by St. Gaudens. It is Lincoln; but it is also a great deal more. It is the glorification of the Common Man—the apotheosis of Democracy.
As you look at that face and that figure you feel the history of the human race, the long, the bloody, the agonized struggle of the masses of mankind for freedom and light. You see the whole history of your own country, founded by common men for the common people, founded upon freedom and equality and justice.
Here is no vain haughtiness, no arrogance, no supercilious looking down, no cringing looking upward, nothing that suggests class or rank or aristocracy. Here is Democracy, the Common Man exalted in the dignity of his own rights, in the splendor of the recognition of the equal rights of all others; the Common Man, free and enlightened, strong and just.
The statue is in the attitude of preparation to speak. What is that brain formulating for those lips to utter?
The expression of brow and eyes and lips leaves no doubt. It is some thought of freedom and justice, some one of those many mighty democratic thoughts which will echo forever in the minds and hearts of men.
Let us recall three of those thoughts:
“The authors of the Declaration of Independence meant it to be a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism.”
“That this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
“I say that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other man’s consent. I say that this is the leading principle, the sheet-anchor.”
These were the ideas that found this country a few ragged settlements trembling between a hostile sea and a hostile wilderness and built it up to its present estate of democratic grandeur. Not tyranny, not murder disguised as war, not robbery disguised as “benevolent guidance,” not any of the false and foolish ideas of imperialism and aristocracy. But ideas of peace, of equal rights for all, of self-government.