world. It was a discovery without a precedent and without a parallel, and we are preparing to celebrate it. We have been preparing through all these four hundred years. We have a city which sits by the inland sea, like Venice among her marshes. Chicago, with its million inhabitants where so recently the buffalo fed unscared, will make itself into an epitome of America, and send out its card of invitation to all the earth.

And the whole world will come to visit us. The Spaniard will come to see the continent which he discovered. The Frenchman will come to look upon the vast empires which he once coveted, and then helped to free. The Britain will come to mark the progress of his own race in a newer clime. The German will come claiming also a near relationship. The Russian will come to find out what liberty is like. There will be the Icelander with his fur, the Italian with his music, and the Chinaman with his cue. The motley procession will be filled out by wierd costumes from Egypt and Labrador, and all the other highways and hedges of the world. Those who do not come in person will come in thought, and the attention of the world will be focussed upon America.

We shall have much to show them. They will sail up the storied Hudson, stand beside the sublimity of Niagara, visit the far Yosemite, and the Yellowstone, and compare Lake Superior and the Mississippi with the Mediterranean and the Nile. They will compute our forests and our prairies, gauge our wells of oil and of gas, estimate our mines, and appraise all our natural resources. They may have the experience of Sheba's queen when they pass through our Patent Office, inspect our manufactories, traverse our railway systems, and visit our cities- cities which do not stand knee-deep in

the dust of ages, but which are struggling up through the intoxication of prosperity toward self-possession.

But while our visitors stand thus astonished at our material glories, and acknowledge that the half was not told them, they will still make some further inquiries. "What are the ideas," they will ask, "which all this wealth represents? What types of manhood does America produce? Who are your national heroes?" And we shall say to them: "If you would come near to the heart of America, and feel the breath of that spirit which has made her truly great, pass by New York with the thunder of its commerce, pass by Washington with the glitter of its display, and spend a thoughtful hour at Mt. Vernon. And when you have done that, pass by Chicago with its roar of traffic, and pause beside the tomb at Springfield."

The career of Lincoln may reveal, more than that of any other single individual, the genius of American institutions and of the American people. He was all American. The heroes of the old world are linked together in one vast dynasty of greatness. The Ptolemies, the Cæsars, the Plantagenets, still bear sway among their descendants and "rule us from their urns." But Columbia begins a new order. The shadow of the pyramids falls upon every European, but it does not cross the sea. Like the Greek colonists, to be sure, we brought the coals which were to kindle the altar fires of our civilization from the hearth of our mother city. But we have received fresh fire, also. The Promethean torch of our genius has been kindled from God's lightning above us, and from hard blows upon the flinty rock beneath us. We indeed revere the gracious influences which come to us from the cradle lands, but we have attained our intellectual majority, and we prove it by

pointing to men of finest grain and most heroic mould. developed among surroundings which savor least of the old world.

of

So, too, the life of Lincoln is an epitome of America's history and aspirations. The political, constitutional, and moral struggles of all our annals converge upon the few eventful years of his public life. And so it happens that this man came to posses three kinds of greatness: He was great for the acts which he performed; the liberator of a race deserves to rank above the founders of dynasties, or the discoverers of continents. But many whose lot it has been to perform great deeds have been themselves unworthy, while Lincoln was in his own personality greater than any his achievements. The one proclamation by which he will be remembered forever did not exhaust his powers. It was in him to write a hundred such proclamations. There is a third kind of greatness which belongs especially to those who serve republics, and which we may call representative greatness. There was a time when Napoleon had so engrossed the loyalty of his countrymen that he could say, "I am France." It was a far greater triumph, because a moral one, when Pericles enslaved the Athenians to his patriotism and his intellect, so that when he spoke it seemed the voice of the state. Such was the greatness of Lincoln. He came to be the representative and embodiment of the best sentiments, the triumphant sentiments of his nation, so that loyal millions spoke through his lips.

Lincoln was, first of all, God's man, raised up to meet a great emergency. We in America believe that "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will."

He might have worn some other name, but without such a leader, it may almost be said, America could not have fulfilled her destiny.

This continent lay fallow for a hundred years after its discovery. The Spaniards laid hold of it, but God said, "I am tired of your cruelty and rapacity," and it began to slip from their grasp. The Frenchmen seemed to do better, but God said, "The Catholic religion is too gross and formal for this new world," and the Frenchmen fell back. England had her day, but in district schools, free churches, and town meetings the colonists were made ready for the day of independence. No more foreign dominion! The last sail of the retiring British fleet melts into the horizon. America is free!

Free! But now confronted by the problems of selfgovernment. And first she must make in a day what it took the English people five hundred years to makea constitution.

Before the constitution came the famous "Ordinace of 1787," which marked out several great lines of policy. This ordinance appropriated public lands for the support of common schools. It provided that the territories should ultimately be admitted as equal states, thus settling in advance for America all questions of "Home Rule." And thirdly, it decreed that throughout the North-west territory,

"There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."

This third provision introduces us to what the impartial foreign historian Von Holst has called "the pivotal question in American history"—the question of slavery. This was the sphinx which in Abraham Lincoln found its Oedipus!

We have now to trace the decline and revival of the spirit of liberty in America. Our national triumphlike most human triumphs perhaps—consists in having cured a great fault. The ordiance of '87 was the voice of the revolution, expressing the aspirations of ultimate America, but it was nearly four-score years before this ideal was realized, and the language of the ordinance written into the constitution as the XIII Amendment.

We must not be swift to blame the slave-holders for not overturning their social system in a day by an act of immediate emancipation. It is due, however, to the truth of history to show how, by unprincipalled leaders, a portion of our countrymen were induced to resist all plans for gradual emancipation, and finally to demand as the dearest of their rights the privilege of extending slavery over the entire Union.

When our constitution was formed slavery was universal, but gradual emancipation was favored by all the colonies except Georgia and the Carolinas. Charles Pinckney and General Davie were the men who discovered the value of threats against the union. By such threats they secured certain concessions to slavery in the Constitution itself-concessions, however, which would never have been made had it not been for the general belief that slavery would die out under existing conditions.

It was not until 1820 that the mistake was discovered, and that discovery, in the words of the aged Jefferson, startled the country "like a fire-bell in the night." It was proposed in Congress to extend the ordinance of '87, prohibiting slavery and involuntary servitude, to the new state of Missouri, and this proposition was opposed by the Southern members. The country awoke to the