The Project Gutenberg eBook of Address of President Roosevelt on the occasion of the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, Hodgenville, Ky., February 12, 1909, by Theodore Roosevelt
Title: Address of President Roosevelt on the occasion of the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, Hodgenville, Ky., February 12, 1909
Produced by: Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT ON THE OCCASION OF THE CELEBRATION OF THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, HODGENVILLE, KY., FEBRUARY 12, 1909 ***
As a people we are indeed beyond
measure fortunate in the characters of the
two greatest of our public men, Washington
and Lincoln. Widely though they
differed in externals, the Virginia landed
gentleman and the Kentucky backwoodsman,
they were alike in essentials, they
were alike in the great qualities which
made each able to render service to his
nation and to all mankind such as no
other man of his generation could or did
render. Each had lofty ideals, but each[6]
in striving to attain these lofty ideals was
guided by the soundest common sense.
Each possessed inflexible courage in adversity,
and a soul wholly unspoiled by
prosperity. Each possessed all the gentler
virtues commonly exhibited by good
men who lack rugged strength of character.
Each possessed also all the strong qualities
commonly exhibited by those towering
masters of mankind who have too often
shown themselves devoid of so much as
the understanding of the words by which[7]
we signify the qualities of duty, of mercy,
of devotion to the right, of lofty disinterestedness
in battling for the good of
others. There have been other men as
great and other men as good; but in all
the history of mankind there are no other
two great men as good as these, no other
two good men as great. Widely though
the problems of to-day differ from the problems
set for solution to Washington when
he founded this nation, to Lincoln when
he saved it and freed the slave; yet the[8]
qualities they showed in meeting these
problems are exactly the same as those
we should show in doing our work to-day.
Lincoln saw into the future with the
prophetic imagination usually vouchsafed
only to the poet and the seer. He had
in him all the lift toward greatness of
the visionary, without any of the visionary’s
fanaticism or egotism, without any
of the visionary’s narrow jealousy of the
practical man and inability to strive in
practical fashion for the realization of an[9]
ideal. He had the practical man’s hard
common sense and willingness to adapt
means to ends; but there was in him
none of that morbid growth of mind and
soul which blinds so many practical men
to the higher things of life. No more
practical man ever lived than this homely
backwoods idealist; but he had nothing
in common with those practical men
whose consciences are warped until they
fail to distinguish between good and evil,
fail to understand that strength, ability,[10]
shrewdness, whether in the world of business
or of politics, only serve to make
their possessor a more noxious, a more
evil member of the community, if they are
not guided and controlled by a fine and
high moral sense.
We of this day must try to solve many
social and industrial problems, requiring to
an especial degree the combination of indomitable
resolution with cool-headed sanity.
We can profit by the way in which
Lincoln used both these traits as he strove[11]
for reform. We can learn much of value
from the very attacks which following that
course brought upon his head, attacks alike
by the extremists of revolution and by
the extremists of reaction. He never wavered
in devotion to his principles, in his
love for the Union, and in his abhorrence
of slavery. Timid and lukewarm people
were always denouncing him because he
was too extreme; but as a matter of fact
he never went to extremes, he worked step
by step; and because of this the extremists[12]
hated and denounced him with a
fervor which now seems to us fantastic
in its deification of the unreal and the
impossible. At the very time when one
side was holding him up as the apostle of
social revolution because he was against
slavery, the leading abolitionist denounced
him as the “slave hound of Illinois.”
When he was the second time candidate
for President, the majority of his opponents
attacked him because of what they
termed his extreme radicalism, while a[13]
minority threatened to bolt his nomination
because he was not radical enough.
He had continually to check those who
wished to go forward too fast, at the very
time that he overrode the opposition of
those who wished not to go forward at all.
The goal was never dim before his vision;
but he picked his way cautiously, without
either halt or hurry, as he strode toward
it, through such a morass of difficulty
that no man of less courage would have
attempted it, while it would surely have[14]
overwhelmed any man of judgment less
serene.
Yet perhaps the most wonderful thing
of all, and, from the standpoint of the
America of to-day and of the future, the
most vitally important, was the extraordinary
way in which Lincoln could fight
valiantly against what he deemed wrong
and yet preserve undiminished his love
and respect for the brother from whom he
differed. In the hour of a triumph that
would have turned any weaker man’s[15]
head, in the heat of a struggle which
spurred many a good man to dreadful
vindictiveness, he said truthfully that so
long as he had been in his office he had
never willingly planted a thorn in any
man’s bosom, and besought his supporters
to study the incidents of the trial through
which they were passing as philosophy
from which to learn wisdom and not as
wrongs to be avenged; ending with
the solemn exhortation that, as the
strife was over, all should reunite in a[16]
common effort to save their common
country.
He lived in days that were great and
terrible, when brother fought against
brother for what each sincerely deemed to
be the right. In a contest so grim the
strong men who alone can carry it through
are rarely able to do justice to the deep
convictions of those with whom they
grapple in mortal strife. At such times
men see through a glass darkly; to only
the rarest and loftiest spirits is vouchsafed[17]
that clear vision which gradually comes to
all, even to the lesser, as the struggle
fades into distance, and wounds are forgotten,
and peace creeps back to the
hearts that were hurt. But to Lincoln
was given this supreme vision. He did
not hate the man from whom he differed.
Weakness was as foreign as wickedness
to his strong, gentle nature; but his
courage was of a quality so high that it
needed no bolstering of dark passion.
He saw clearly that the same high qualities,[18]
the same courage, and willingness
for self-sacrifice, and devotion to the
right as it was given them to see the
right, belonged both to the men of the
North and to the men of the South. As
the years roll by, and as all of us, wherever
we dwell, grow to feel an equal pride in
the valor and self-devotion, alike of the
men who wore the blue and the men who
wore the gray, so this whole nation will
grow to feel a peculiar sense of pride in
the man whose blood was shed for the[19]
union of his people and for the freedom
of a race; the lover of his country and
of all mankind; the mightiest of the
mighty men who mastered the mighty
days, Abraham Lincoln.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT ON THE OCCASION OF THE CELEBRATION OF THE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, HODGENVILLE, KY., FEBRUARY 12, 1909 ***
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