"Lo, where the feet of Lincoln passed, the earth Is sacred. Where he knelt we set a shrine! Oh, to have pressed his hand! That had sufficed To make my children wonder at my worth---- Yet, let them glory, since their land and mine Hath reared the greatest martyr after Christ!" Virginia Boyle, in her poem for the Philadelphia Brigade Association, said in two of her stanzas: "No trumpet blared the word that he was born, No lightning flashed its symbols on that day: And only Poverty and Fate pressed on, To serve as handmaids where he lowly lay. "And up from Earth and toil, he slowly won,---- Pressed by a bitterness he proudly spurned, Till by grim courage, born from sun to sun, He turned defeat, as victory is turned." Edwin Markham concluded a centennial poem as follows: "He held his place---- Held the long purpose like a growing tree---- Held on through blame and faltered not at praise, And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs, Goes down with a great shout upon the hills, And leaves a lonesome place against the sky." CHAPTER XI CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS I. THE HARMONIZING CONTRAST OF MEN American freedom and democratic humanity require American minds to be composed of free-made ideas, organized efficiently for the righteous promotion of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," if we are ever to be safe in the faith that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." The American order, however defective, even as it is composed of defective minds, is the only safety for a free humanity. The Western hemisphere is under the control of that democratic order, and America is large enough and powerful enough to stand alone, in clear vision and unadulterated theory, for the rights of man. America alone is clear-minded enough for the unprejudiced and unbiased championship of a free-minded world. Washington and Lincoln reached the heights from which they saw together one vision of the Promised Land, "ordained from the foundations of the world" for the chosen order of human evolution. They wanted no "entangling alliances" with a foreign order, or a fragmentary system of human freedom. Americans have so far kept the peace with the uncompromised moral law of the "free and equal" rights of man. America is dedicated to the proposition that a compromised order of freedom and equality, either through treaty or war, shall never invade the Western Hemisphere.