But his second inaugural, too, is a gem of wisdom, clear and pure, fit ornament for any man to wear in any place where wisest men convene. Let keenest eyes examine narrowly the aspiration with which this second inaugural concludes. There shines a wish as bright as any human hope that ever shone in human breast--a wish that all the earth might gain to just and lasting peace. That yearning plea was voiced upon the very breath that spoke of the battles and wounds, the dead and the bereft, of a mighty Nation in fratricidal war. The peace he sought for within all the land, and through all the earth, was to be the national consummation of a conflict in which multitudes of men and millions of treasure had been offered up under God in the name of charity and right. Such was the wording and the setting of this wish. Comprehend its girth. It encircled all the earth. This cannot be said to be nothing but the ill-considered aspiration of an inexperienced underling. It is the prayer of one who for four terrific years had held the chief position in conducting the executive affairs of one of the major empires of the world. During all that time, among the bewildering and imperious problems of an era of unexampled civil convulsion, hardly any complications had been more obstinate or more disturbing than those bound up in the relation of the United States to the other major Nations of the world. Within those international complications were infolded problems and principles as profoundly fundamental as any within any Nation's single life, or within all the reach of international law. In such a situation and out of such a career Lincoln culminates the declaration of his policy for a second presidential term with an invocation of just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all Nations.