"Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this Continent a new nation, 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 are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that 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 poor power to add or to detract. The world will 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 which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that 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, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." The President ceased to speak. There was no thunderstorm of applause such as had followed Everett's studied sentences and polished periods. There was no applause at all. One long stir of emotion throbbed through the silent throng, but did not break the silence. Then the multitude dispersed, talking of what Everett had said, thinking of what Lincoln had said. Most of the notables on the platform thought the President's speech a failure. Time has shown that it was one of the greatest things even he ever did. Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews has written in her short story "The Perfect Tribute" the history of the Gettysburg speech. The boy who would know what manner of man our Abraham Lincoln was should read "The Perfect Tribute." One of the characters in the story, a dying Confederate officer, says to Lincoln without knowing to whom he was speaking: "The speech so went home to the hearts of all those thousands of people that when it ended it was as if the whole audience held its breath--there was not a hand lifted to applaud. One might as well applaud the Lord's prayer--it would be sacrilege. And they all felt it--down to the lowest. There was a long minute of reverent silence, no sound from all that great throng--it seems to me, an enemy, that it was the most perfect tribute that has ever been paid by any people to any orator." The Gettysburg speech was not for the moment. It is for all time. CHAPTER X