ich the
position of the United States and the attitude of Great Britain were
set forth with the clearness and force which long experience and great
ability had placed at the command of the Secretary. Upon almost every
page of that original draught are erasures, additions, and marginal
notes in the handwriting of Abraham Lincoln, which exhibit a sagacity,
a breadth of wisdom, and a comprehension of the whole subject,
impossible to be found except in a man of the very first order. And
these modifications of a great state paper were made by a man who but
three months before had entered for the first time the wide theatre of
Executive action.

Gifted with an insight and a foresight which the ancients would have
called divination, he saw, in the midst of darkness and obscurity, the
logic of events, and forecast the result. From the first, in his own
quaint, original way, without ostentation or offense to his
associates, he was pilot and commander of his administration. He was
one of the few great rulers whose wisdom increased with his power, and
whose spirit grew gentler and tenderer as his triumphs were
multiplied.

This was the man, and these his associates, who look down upon us from
the canvas.

The present is not a fitting occasion to examine, with any
completeness, the causes that led to the Proclamation of Emancipation;
but the peculiar relation of that act to the character of Abraham
Lincoln cannot be understood, without considering one remarkable fact
in his history. His earlier years were passed in a region remote from
the centers of political thought, and without access to the great
world of books. But the few books that came within his reach he
devoured with the divine hunger of genius. One paper, above all
others, led him captive, and filled his spirit with the majesty of
its truth and the sublimity of its eloquence. It was the Declaration
of American Independence. The author and the signers of that
instrument became, in his early youth, the heroes of his political
worship. I doubt if history affords any example of a life so early, so
deeply, and so permanently influenced by a single political truth, as
was Abraham Lincoln's by the central doctrine of the Declaration,--the
liberty and equality of all men. Long before his fame had become
national he said, "That is the electric cord in the Declaration, that
links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, and
that will link such hearts as long a