THE ABBOTTSFORD
SILENT READING LESSONS
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
No. 3
Abbottsford Series of Readers
FOR SUPPLEMENTARY WORK
Four Letters of Pliny the Roman
Lots of 25, $1.25; Postage 7c
The Ancient Mariner, With Notes
Lots of 25, $2.25; Postage 11c
Abraham Lincoln
Lots of 25, $1.25; Postage 7c
The Stone Autograph Album
Lots of twenty-five, $2; Postage 7c
Copyrighted, 1919
WALTER A. ABBOTT
Publisher
1130 Mission Street
South Pasadena, Cal.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
By President Woodrow Wilson
Address by Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, on the occasion of the acceptance by the War Department of a deed of gift to the Nation by the Lincoln Farm Association of the Lincoln birthplace farm at Hodgenville, Ky. Here, over the log cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born, destined to preserve the Nation and to free the slave, a grateful people have dedicated this memorial to unity, peace, and brotherhood among these States.
No more significant memorial could have been presented to the Nation than this. It expresses so much of what is singular and noteworthy in the history of the country; it suggests so many of the things that we prize most highly in our life and in our system of government. How eloquent this little house within this shrine is of the vigor of democracy! There is nowhere in the land any home so remote, so humble, that it may not contain the power of mind and heart and conscience to which nations yield and history submits its processes. Nature pays no tribute to aristocracy, subscribes to no creed of caste, renders fealty to no monarch or master of any name or kind. Genius is no snob. It does not run after titles or seek by preference the high circles of society. It affects humble company as well as great. It pays no special tribute to universities or learned societies or conventional standards of greatness, but serenely chooses its own comrades, its own haunts, its own cradle even, and its own life of adventure and of training. Here is proof of it. This little hut was the cradle of one of the great sons of men, a man of singular, delightful, vital genius who presently emerged upon the great stage of the Nation’s history, gaunt, shy, ungainly, but dominant and majestic, a natural ruler of men, himself inevitably the central figure of the great plot. No man can explain this, but every man can see how it demonstrates the vigor of democracy, where every door is open, in every hamlet and countryside, in city and wilderness alike, for the ruler to emerge when he will and claim his leadership in the free life. Such are the authentic proofs of the validity and vitality of democracy.