eatness of the theme and the needlessness of the task. What part
of the habitable globe has not heard of the wonders of his life?
Everywhere they are rehearsed. His own countrymen, in extolling
them, can give no information even to the stranger.'

"Of Lincoln no words can be uttered or withheld that could add
to or detract from his imperishable fame. His name is the
common heritage of all people and all times.

"When in the loom of time have such words been heard above the din
of fierce conflict as his sublime utterances but a brief time before
his tragic death?

"'With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness
in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to
finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care
for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and
his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and
lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.'

"The men who knew Abraham Lincoln, who saw him face to face, who
met him upon our streets, and heard his voice in our public
assemblages have, with few exceptions, passed to the grave. Another
generation is upon the busy stage. The book has forever closed
upon the dread pageant of civil strife. Sectional animosities,
thank God, belong now only to the past. The mantle of peace is
over our entire land, and prosperity within all our borders.

"'Till the war-drum throbs no longer,
And the battle-flags are furled
In the parliament of man,
The federation of the world.'

"Through the instrumentality in no small measure of the man personally
known to some who hear me, the man McLean County delighted to honor,
no less as a private citizen than as President, this Government,
untouched by the finger of time, has descended to us. Let it never
be forgotten that the responsibility of its preservation and
transmission will rest upon the successive generations of his
countrymen, as they shall come and go.

"Truly it has been said: 'To-day is the pupil of yesterday,'
and also 'History is the great teacher of human nature by means of
object-lessons drawn from the whole recorded life of human nature.'
There is, then, no dead past. Every event is in a measure significant.
The annals of the ambitions, the crimes, the miseries, the wrongs,
the struggles, the achievements of men in the long past are fraught
with lessons of deep import to all succeeding generations. Each
age is the