Deep national thankfulness was felt at this, the first great victory for the North. The battlefield was only a few miles from the capital, and many of the citizens and the most prominent men of the town assembled to perform a service for the dead who had fallen there. Lincoln was called upon to speak. He had not prepared anything, but the short speech which he gave made a deep impression upon all who heard it, and puts into very noble words the thoughts that were always present to his mind. “Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth a new nation upon this continent, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We meet to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting-place of those who here gave their lives that the nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will take little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be dedicated here to the great task remaining before us: that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion for the cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” In words like these, Lincoln inspired the people of the North to see the greatness of the cause for which they were fighting; they were fighting for liberty, for a free government of free men, for a United America that might be to the world a pattern of such a free government. If the South won, if America were a house divided for ever against itself, one half would have slavery; if the North won, and America were a whole again, slavery was gone; the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming the equal rights of all men to life and liberty, would be for the first time fully realised.