otherwise than our own Lincoln
could not have found himself or the path of fame and power upon which he
walked serenely to his death. In this place it is right that we should
remind ourselves of the solid and striking facts upon which our faith in
democracy is founded. Many another man besides Lincoln has served the
nation in its highest places of counsel and of action whose origins were
as humble as his. Though the greatest example of the universal energy,
richness, stimulation, and force of democracy, he is only one example
among many. The permeating and all-pervasive virtue of the freedom which
challenges us in America to make the most of every gift and power we
possess every page of our history serves to emphasize and illustrate.
Standing here in this place, it seems almost the whole of the stirring
story.

Here Lincoln had his beginnings. Here the end and consummation of that
great life seem remote and a bit incredible. And yet there was no break
anywhere between beginning and end, no lack of natural sequence
anywhere. Nothing really incredible happened. Lincoln was unaffectedly
as much at home in the White House as he was here. Do you share with me
the feeling, I wonder, that he was permanently at home nowhere? It seems
to me that in the case of a man,--I would rather say of a spirit,--like
Lincoln the question _where_ he was is of little significance, that it
is always _what_ he was that really arrests our thought and takes hold
of our imagination. It is the spirit always that is sovereign. Lincoln,
like the rest of us, was put through the discipline of the world,--a
very rough and exacting discipline for him, an indispensable discipline
for every man who would know what he is about in the midst of the
world's affairs; but his spirit got only its schooling there. It did not
derive its character or its vision from the experiences which brought it
to its full revelation. The test of every American must always be, not
where he is, but what he is. That, also, is of the essence of democracy,
and is the moral of which this place is most gravely expressive.

We would like to think of men like Lincoln and Washington as typical
Americans, but no man can be typical who is so unusual as these great
men were. It was typical of American life that it should produce such
men with supreme indifference as to the manner in which it produced
them, and as readily here in this hut as amidst the little circle of
cultivated gentlemen