Nevertheless, slavery increased continually. I beg that you will pause a moment to consider the man who cleansed this terrible stain which obscured the stars of the American banner. I beg that you will pause a moment, for his immortal name has been invoked for the perpetuation of slavery. Ah ! the past century has not, the century to come will not have, a figure so grand, because as evil disappears, so disappears heroism also. I have often contemplated and described his life. Born in a cabin of Kentucky, of parents who could hardly read ; born a new Moses in the solitude of the desert, where are forged ail great and obstinate thoughts, monotonous like the desert, and, like the desert, sublime ; growing up among those primeval forests, which, with their fragrance, send a cloud of incense, and, with their murmurs, a cloud of prayers to Heaven ; a boatman at eight years in the impetuous current of the Ohio, and at seventeen in the vast and tranquil waters of the Mississippi ; later a woodman, with axe and arm felling the immemorial trees, to open a way to unexplored regions for his tribe of wandering workers ; reading no other book than the Bible,* the book of great sorrows and great hopes, dictated often by prophets to the sound of fetters they dragged through Nineveh and Babylon; a child of Nature, in a word, by one of those miracles only comprehensible among free peoples he fought for the country and was raised by his fellow-citizens to the Congress at Washington, and by the nation to the Presidency of the Republic ; and when the evil grew more virulent, when those States were dissolved, when the slaveholders uttered their warcry, and the slaves their groans of despair—the woodcutter, the boatman, the son of the great West, the descendant of Quakers, humblest of the humble before his conscience, greatest of the great before history, ascends the Capitol, the greatest moral height of our time, and strong and serene with his conscience and his thought; before him a veteran army, hostile Europe behind him ; England favoring the South ; France encouraging reaction in Mexico, in his hands the riven country; he arms two million men, gathers a half million of horses, sends his artillery twelve hundred miles in a week, from the banks of the Potomac to the shores of Tennessee; fights more than six hundred battles ; renews before Richmond the deeds of Alexander, of Cæsar; and, after having emancipated three million slaves, that nothing might be wanting, he dies in the very moment of victory-like Christ, like Socrates, like all redeemers, at the foot of his work. His work! Sublime achievement ! over which humanity shall eternally shed its tears, and God his benediction ! * An error due to imperfect information on the part of the speaker. Lincoln read almost every book that came in his way. AMERICAN ORATORS PAGE 94 NAME PAGE NAME Howe, Joseph . Lockwood, Belva Ann. Macdonald, Sir John A. 73 Mitchell, John Otis, James . Roosevelt, Theodore Sumner, Charles Toombs, Robert . 32 Watterson, Henry 176 47 98 . 138 332 83 69 EUROPEAN ORATORS PAGE 410 438 398 536 436 578 NAME PAGE NAME Æschines Knox, John 567 Antony, Mark 425 Kossuth, Louis 622 Bacon, Francis 456 610 Beaconsfield, Earl of . 543 564 Bismarck, Prince Otto von 632 Luther, Martin Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne 443 Lysias Bourdaloue, Louis .. 446 Bright, John Macaulay, Thomas Babington 553 Brougham, Lord Henry 521 Magnus, Albertus . Burke, Edmund . . . 476 Manning, Henry Edward 602 Cæsar, Caius Julius 417 Massillon, Jean Baptiste . 452 Calvin, John 441 Mazzini, Giuseppe 625 Canning, George 510 Mirabeau, Count Honoré de 590 Castelar, Emilio . 637 Cato, Marcus Porcius 413 575 Cavour, Count Camillo di 629 Chamberlain, Joseph 560 517 Chatham, Earl of .. 472 Chesterfield, Earl of . 468 Palmerston, Viscount 524 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 420 587 Cobden, Richard 540 557 Coke, Sir Edward 459 526 Cousin, Victor. 607 395 Crispi, Francesco 635 502 Cromwell, Oliver 466 Pym, John 463 Curran, John Philpot 493 Robespierre, Maximilien Isidore de. 604 Danton, George Jacques . 598 Russell, Lord John 404 430 Eliot, Sir John 461 Saint Bernard . 434 Emmet, Robert 505 452 Erskine, Lord Thomas . 485 Sheil, Richard L. 533 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 496 Fénelon, François . 449 Smith, Sydney 513 Fox, Charles James 481 Spurgeon, Charles H. 584 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn 581 Gambetta, Léon. 619 Gladstone, William Ewart 547 Thiers, Louis Adolphe . 613 Gracchus, Caius. 415 Grattan, Henry 489 Vergniaud, Pierre . 595 Hugo, Marie Victor . 616 Wesley, John. .. 569 Whitefield, George 572 Isocrates .. 401 Wilberforce, William 500 There are 704 pages in this volume. The sixty-four full-page half-tone illustrations should be added to the last fólio number indicated (640) giving a total of 704 pages. 639 529 OF TE LIBRARY |