To My Wife
“The world will little note
nor long remember what
we say here, but it can
never forget what they
did here—”
A. Lincoln
Foreword
THE aim of this play is to represent the impulse and the progress of civil liberty in this country since the commencement of the War for Independence. The intention is never literal. In spite of a certain actuality in the presentation of the incidents of “The Glorious Morning” at Lexington, the play must always be considered and produced as an abstraction of the events with which it is concerned.
The events themselves are marked by the great sayings of our prophets of liberty and of sundry other minds of genius, all quite arbitrarily selected. Great sayings, through their immense significance to the popular imagination, become symbols of the periods which occasioned them. Great activities may, in the same sense, be looked upon as abstractions of the periods and movements which required them and made them possible.