tremendous
drafts on the resources of the country, in the height and top of our
burdens, the heart of this people is such that now, when the head of
government is stricken down, the public funds do not waver, but
stand as the granite ribs in our mountains.

Republican institutions have been vindicated in this experience as
they never were before; and the whole history of the last four
years, rounded up by this cruel stroke, seems, in the providence of
God, to have been clothed, now, with an illustration, with a
sympathy, with an aptness, and with a significance, such as we never
could have expected nor imagined. God, I think, has said, by the
voice of this event, to all nations of the earth, "Republican
liberty, based upon true Christianity, is firm as the foundation of
the globe."

Even he who now sleeps has, by this event, been clothed with new
influence. Dead, he speaks to men who now willingly hear what before
they refused to listen to. Now his simple and weighty words will be
gathered like those of Washington, and your children and your
children's children shall be taught to ponder the simplicity and
deep wisdom of utterances which, in their time, passed, in party
heat, as idle words. Men will receive a new impulse of patriotism
for his sake and will guard with zeal the whole country which he
loved so well. I swear you, on the altar of his memory, to be more
faithful to the country for which he has perished. They will, as
they follow his hearse, swear a new hatred to that slavery against
which he warred, and which, in vanquishing him, has made him a
martyr and a conqueror. I swear you, by the memory of this martyr,
to hate slavery with an unappeasable hatred. They will admire and
imitate the firmness of this man, his inflexible conscience for the
right, and yet his gentleness, as tender as a woman's, his
moderation of spirit, which not all the heat of party could inflame,
nor all the jars and disturbances of his country shake out of
place. I swear you to an emulation of his justice, his moderation,
and his mercy.

You I can comfort; but how can I speak to that twilight million to
whom his name was as the name of an angel of God? There will be
wailing in places which no minister shall be able to reach. When,
in hovel and in cot, in wood and in wilderness, in the field
throughout the South, the dusky children, who looked upon him as
that Moses whom God sent before them to lead them out of the land of