"Among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet."
"And then there will be some black men who can remember that with silent tongue, and clinched teeth and steady eye and well-poised bayonet they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while I fear there will be some white ones unable to forget that with malignant heart and deceitful speech they strove to hinder it."
LINCOLN'S GETTYSBURG SPEECH.
Four score and ten years ago our fathers brought forth upon 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 or so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting place of 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 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 that they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion, that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall under God, 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.
[1] Charles Dickens.