Again let it be said, and be it not forgotten, that it is from the lips of Lincoln that this appeal ascends. He is not a novice. He is a seasoned veteran. Coming from that heart, and spoken in that hour, those words cannot be lightly flung aside. They are the longing of a man who, through almost unparalleled discipline, has attained an almost peerless sobriety, sincerity, and clear-sightedness. Too honest to utter hollow words, too deliberate to accept an ill-judged phrase, too discerning to recommend a futile and unlikely proposition, and sobered far beyond any power or inclination to play the hypocrite, we must concede that Lincoln meant and measured what he said. In simple fairness, and in all sobriety, we must allow that Lincoln understood that the principles which guided him as national chief magistrate, and the goal towards which he was driving everything in his conduct of the war, contained all needed light and power for winning all the world to perpetual harmony. This is nothing less than to allow in Lincoln's deeds and words the sweep and insight of a philosopher. And it is but simple justice, though of vast significance, to append just here that it was in the office and person of John Hay, Lincoln's private secretary, when later he was our Secretary of State, that there dawned and brightened the new era in international diplomacy, now in our day so widely inaugurated, and so well advanced. It can be truly added that in this vast arena, where mighty Nations are the actors, and in very fact all the world is the stage, those cardinal moral traits of Lincoln, and his transparent and commanding personality, so steadfast and vivid and gentle and meek, have no need to borrow from other and ancient theories and illustrations of world-wide statesmanship either light or power. That each individual retain unsmirched and undiminished his pristine self-respect as the cornerstone of all reliability, his neighborly kindness as the prime condition of all true comity, his child-like deference towards God as the basis of all genuine dignity, and his rating of human souls above all perishable goods as the absolute and essential foundation of any perpetuity, forms a programme as elemental and imperial among mightiest Nations, as among humblest neighborhoods of men. Lincoln's obedient recognition of the Almighty's purposes in over-ruling national affairs, his king-like resolution to hold loyally by his innate sense of equity, his eagerness for the elevation of all the oppressed, his instinctive aspiration in his civic life for foundations that cannot fail, and his uncomplaining fellowship with the penal sorrows of his erring fellow citizens,--all apprehended and defended and adhered to with such a lucid mind and steadfast will and prophetic hope upon the open platform of our American Republic--propose both in active practice and in reasoned theory a pattern of statesmanship, capable of