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iipiiupuuiipi iwuwuy9pvvvv9vipapp?pvppnpppappnv LINCOLN'S GETTYSBURG SPEECH Delivered by Abraham Lincoln at the dedication of the National Ceme tery on the site of the Battle of Gettysburg on November 19, 1863 50 years ago today. Fourscore-and-seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this con-' tinent 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 that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives thaH 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 power to add or to de tract. 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, tobef 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 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 free-: dom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN THOUGHT THAT ADDRESS WAS A FAILURE HIS GETTYSBURG Fifty years ago two addresses were made at Gettysburg at the conse cration of the national cemetery there. One was by the most cultured man in American public life. Himself the scion of a distinguished ancestry, he had received the utmost training of our most aristocratic university; had been a governor of the most intel lectual of the New England states, an ambassador to Great Britain, a secretary of state, a senator of the United States. Upon the preparation of his ora tion he had spent months of research and then had polished it until every phrase had become classic in form, every word precisely fitted to the ex pression of his thought. Did you ever read the speech of Edward Everett? Did you ever know a person, who has read it? If you should now become curious to read it would you know where to lay your hand upon it? The other speech on that somber November day was made by a gaunt and homely man; the child of abject poverty, painfully self-taught. Press ed upon by relentless duties of the most difficult office in the world at the time of its greatest crisis, he had put off the preparation of it until aboard the train which was taking him to the historic site. And then, with a stumpy pencil, he had scrib bled it, between train-jolts, on pieces of brown wrapping paper which a fellow-passenger no less a person age than the haughty' secretary of state, William H. Seward had toss ed away! But who has not read, who has not been thrilled by, who does not know by heart, the immortal address of