And, while America was getting ready to honor Lincoln, none might pretend to understand his people who had not first discovered what it is in his character and in ours that, even in this day of restless commercialism, makes us love him above comparison in the story of the world’s great men--love him for his poverty, for his simplicity, for his humanity, for his fidelity, for his justice, for his plainness, for his life and for his death. By sheer force of character, conscience-inspired, Abraham Lincoln rose from abject depths of squalid environment to become the most august figure in American history, and perhaps the most significant and lovable personality in the annals of mankind. In his amazing emergence to greatness from poverty and ignorance is to be found a supreme demonstration and justification of American institutions. It was the common people who recognized the nobility and majesty in this singular man. He understood that always, and, even in his days of power, when great battles were fought at a nod of his head, and a whisk of his pen set a whole race free, it kept him humble. Perhaps the profoundly tender love which the American people have for his memory is to be explained by the fact that in the secret recesses where every man communes with the highest, bravest and most unselfish elements of his own nature, the average American is an Abraham Lincoln to himself. The power to recognize is not so far removed from the power to be recognized, and it is thrillingly significant, after all these dreary years of babble about the omnipotence of money, that the same people who raised Lincoln from penniless obscurity to his place of power and martyrdom, still cherish his name and example with a depth of devotion that increases with each year of national growth, confusing and confounding the learned foreign critics of the Republic, who miss the finest thing in American civilization when they fail to learn why we love Lincoln. II If Daniel Boone, the mighty hunter and Indian fighter, had not roused the imagination of Virginians and Carolinians by his wonderful and romantic deeds in the exploration of the Kentucky wilderness, the grandfather of Abraham Lincoln would not have left Rockingham County, Virginia, and “entered” seventeen hundred acres of land in Kentucky, where he was presently slain on his forest farm by a savage in the presence of his three sons. The youngest of these sons, Thomas Lincoln, was the father of the future President of the United States. In spite of an educated, well-to-do American ancestry of pure English Quaker stock--one was a member of the Boston Tea Party; another was a revolutionary minuteman, served in the Continental Congress and was Attorney General of the United States under Jefferson--this frontier boy, who was only six years old when his father was murdered before his eyes, grew up without education, to be a wandering work boy, who gradually picked up odd jobs of carpentering.