for subsidies ask themselves whether they prefer subsidies to unsullied honor.

The most patriotic man, ladies and gentlemen, is sometimes the man who goes in the direction that he thinks right even when he sees half the world against him. It is the dictate of patriotism to sacrifice yourself if you think that that is the path of honor and of duty. Do not blame others if they do not agree with you. Do not die with bitterness in your heart because you did not convince the rest of the world, but die happy because you believe that you tried to serve your country by not selling your soul. Those were grim days, the days of 1770. Those gentlemen did not attach their names to the Declaration of Independence on this table expecting a holiday on the next day, and that 4th of July was not itself a holiday. They attached their signatures to that significant document knowing that if they failed it was certain that every one of them would hang for the failure. They were committing treason in the interest of the liberty of three million people in America. All the rest of the world was against them and smiled with cynical incredulity at the audacious undertaking. Do you think that if they could see this great Nation now they would regret anything that they then did to draw the gaze of a hostile world upon them? Every idea must be started by somebody, and it is a lonely thing to start anything. Yet if it is in you, you must start it if you have a man's blood in you and if you love the country that you profess to be working for.

I am sometimes very much interested when I see gentlemen supposing that popularity is the way to success in America. The way to success in this great country, with its fair judgments, is to show that you are not afraid of anybody except God and His final verdict. If I did not believe that, I would not believe in democracy. If I did not believe that, I would not believe that people can govern themselves. If I did not believe that the moral judgment would be the last judgment, the final judgment, in the minds of men as well as the tribunal of God, I could not believe in popular government. But I do believe these things, and, therefore, I earnestly believe in the democracy not only of America but of every awakened people that wishes and intends to govern and control its own affairs.

It is very inspiring, my friends, to come to this that may be called the original fountain of independence and liberty in America

and here drink draughts of patriotic feeling which seem to renew the very blood in one's veins. Down in Washington sometimes when the days are hot and the business presses intolerably and there are so many things to do that it does not seem possible to do anything in the way it ought to be done, it is always possible to lift one's thought above the task of the moment and, as it were, to realize that great thing of which we are all parts, the great body of American feeling and American principle. No man could do the work that has to be done in Washington if he allowed himself to be separated from that body of principle. He must make himself feel that he is a part of the people of the United States, that he is trying to think not only for them, but with them, and then he can not feel lonely. He not only can not feel lonely but he can not feel afraid of anything.

My dream is that as the years go on and the world knows more and more of America it will also drink at these fountains of youth and renewal; that it also will turn to America for those moral inspirations which lie at the basis of all freedom; that the world will never fear America unless it feels that it is engaged in some enterprise which is inconsistent with the rights of humanity; and that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.

What other great people has devoted itself to this exalted ideal? To what other nation in the world can all eyes look for an instant sympathy that thrills the whole body politic when men anywhere are fighting for their rights? I do not know that there will ever be a declaration of independence and of grievances for mankind, but I believe that if any such document is ever drawn it will be drawn in the spirit of the American Declaration of Independence, and that America has lifted high the light which will shine unto all generations and guide the feet of mankind to the goal of justice and liberty and peace.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

WOODROW WILSON

[An Address delivered at the Lincoln Birthplace, Hodgenville, Kentucky, September 4, 1916]

No more significant memorial could have been presented to the nation than this. It

expresses so much of what is singular and noteworthy in the history of the country; it suggests so many of the things that we prize most highly in our life and in our system of government. How eloquent this little house within this shrine is of the vigor of democracy! There is nowhere in the land any home so remote, so humble, that it may not contain the power of mind and heart and conscience to which nations yield and history submits its processes. Nature pays no tribute to aristocracy, subscribes to no creed of caste, renders fealty to no monarch or master of any name or kind. Genius is no snob. It does not run after titles or seek by preference the high circles of society. It affects humble company as well as great. It pays no special tribute to universities or learned societies or conventional standards of greatness, but serenely chooses its own comrades, its own haunts, its own cradle even, and its own life of adventure and of training. Here is proof of it. This little hut was the cradle of one of the great sons of men, a man of singular, delightful, vital genius who presently emerged upon the great stage of the nation's history, gaunt, shy, ungainly, but dominant and majestic, a natural ruler of men, himself inevitably the central figure of the great plot. No man can explain this, but every man can see how it demonstrates the vigor of democracy, where every door is open, in every hamlet and countryside, in city and wilderness alike, for the ruler to emerge when he will and claim his leadership in the free life. Such are the authentic proofs of the validity and vitality of democracy.

Here, no less, hides the mystery of democracy. Who shall guess this secret of nature and providence and a free polity? Whatever the vigor and vitality of the stock from which he sprang, its mere vigor and soundness do not explain where this man got his great heart that seemed to comprehend all mankind in its catholic and benignant sympathy, the mind that sat enthroned behind those brooding, melancholy eyes, whose vision swept many an horizon which those about him dreamed not of,-that mind that comprehended what it had never seen, and understood the language of affairs with the ready ease of one to the manner born,—or that nature which seemed in its varied richness to be the familiar of men of every way of life. This is the sacred mystery of democracy, that its richest fruits spring up out of soils which no man has prepared and in cir

cumstances amidst which they are the least expected. This is a place alike of mystery and of reassurance.

It is likely that in a society ordered otherwise than our own, Lincoln could not have found himself or the path of fame and power upon which he walked serenely to his death. In this place it is right that we should remind ourselves of the solid and striking facts upon which our faith in democracy is founded. Many another man besides Lincoln has served the nation in its highest places of counsel and of action whose origins were as humble as his. Though the greatest example of the universal energy, richness, stimulation, and force of democracy, he is only one example among many. The permeating and all-pervasive virtue of the freedom which challenges us in America to make the most of every gift and power we possess, every page of our history serves to emphasize and illustrate. Standing here in this place, it seems almost the whole of the stirring story.

Here

Here Lincoln had his beginnings. the end and consummation of that great life seem remote and a bit incredible. And yet there was no break anywhere between beginning and end, no lack of natural sequence anywhere. Nothing really incredible happened. Lincoln was unaffectedly as much at home in the White House as he was here. Do you share with me the feeling, I wonder, that he was permanently at home nowhere? It seems to me that in the case of a man,-I would rather say of a spirit,-like Lincoln the question where he was is of little significance, that it is always what he was that really arrests our thought and takes hold of our imagination. It is the spirit always that is sovereign. Lincoln, like the rest of us, was put through the discipline of the world, —a very rough and exacting discipline for him, an indispensable discipline for every man who would know what he is about in the midst of the world's affairs; but his spirit got only its schooling there. It did not derive its character or its vision from the experiences which brought it to its full revelation. The test of every American must always be, not where he is, but what he is. That, also, is of the essence of democracy, and is the moral of which this place is most gravely expressive.

We would like to think of men like Lincoln and Washington as typical Americans, but no man can be typical who is so unusual as these great men were. It was typical of

American life that it should produce such men with supreme indifference as to the manner in which it produced them, and as readily here in this hut as amidst the little circle of cultivated gentlemen to whom Virginia owed so much in leadership and example. And Lincoln and Washington were typical Americans in the use they made of their genius. But there will be few such men at best, and we will not look into the mystery of how and why they come. We will only keep the door open for them always, and a hearty welcome,-after we have recognized them.

I have read many biographies of Lincoln; I have sought out with the greatest interest the many intimate stories that are told of him, the narratives of near by friends, the sketches at close quarters, in which those who had the privilege of being associated with him have tried to depict for us the very man himself "in his habit as he lived"; but I have nowhere found a real intimate of Lincoln's. I nowhere get the impression in any narrative or reminiscence that the writer had in fact penetrated to the heart of his mystery, or that any man could penetrate to the heart of it. That brooding spirit had no real familiars. I get the impression that it never spoke out in complete self-revelation, and that it could not reveal itself completely to anyone. It was a very lonely spirit that looked out from underneath those shaggy brows and comprehended men without fully communing with them, as if, in spite of all its genial efforts at comradeship, it dwelt apart, saw its visions of duty where no man looked on. There is a very holy and very terrible isolation for the conscience of every man who seeks to read the destiny in affairs for others as well as for himself, for a nation as well as for individuals. That privacy no man can intrude upon. That lonely search of the spirit for the right, perhaps no man can assist. This strange child of the cabin kept company with invisible things, was born into no intimacy but that of its own silently assembling and deploying thoughts.

I have come here today, not to utter a eulogy on Lincoln; he stands in need of none, but to endeavor to interpret the meaning of this gift to the nation of the place of his birth and origin. Is not this an altar upon which we may forever keep alive the vestal fire of democracy as upon a shrine at which some of the deepest and most sacred hopes of mankind may from age to age be rekindled? For these hopes must constantly be rekindled, and only those who live can rekindle them. The only stuff that can retain the life-giving heat is the stuff of living hearts. And the hopes of mankind cannot be kept alive by words merely, by constitutions and doctrines of right and codes of liberty. The object of democracy is to transmute these into the life and action of society, the self-denial and self-sacrifice of heroic men and women willing to make their lives an embodiment of right and service and enlightened purpose. The commands of democracy are as imperative as its privileges and opportunities are wide and generous. compulsion is upon us. It will be great and lift a great light for the guidance of the nations only if we are great and carry that light high for the guidance of our own feet. We are not worthy to stand here unless we ourselves be in deed and in truth real democrats and servants of mankind, ready to give our very lives for the freedom and justice and spiritual exaltation of the great nation which shelters and nurtures us.

AMERICA

SIDNEY LANIER

Long as thine art shall love true love, Long as thy science truth shall know, Long as thine eagle harms no dove, Long as thy law by law shall grow, Long as thy God is God above,

Thy brother every man below, So long, dear land of all my love,

Its

Thy name shall shine, thy fame shall glow.

nuity of German mind in the imperial Germany of the present and the cosmopolitan Germany of Kant, Schiller, and Goethe, and makes his appeal to Fichte and Hegel instead of to Nietsche.

Continuity, observe; not identity. Continuity permits of development, even of transformation. Continuity may be understood from either end. We may employ the earlier stage to interpret the later; we may employ the later to appreciate and understand the earlier. Thus it is that the fact of continuity may seem to some the condemnation of the classic philosophy; to others the justification of the present mind of Germany. We are on safer ground when we ask after the ideas which have conferred continuity upon the German moral consciousness, and ask what changes of color they have undergone in the century between Jena and Liège.

I find nothing to subtract from the formulæ of Professor Francke. Unconditional submission to duty, salvation through ceaseless striving of will, the moral mission of æsthetic culture-so far as they go, these seem to me the ideas which have formed the continuing mind of Germany. If anything is to be added, it is an idea which in no way conflicts with the three ideas cited. It is the idea of historicism-to employ an expressive if barbarous locution. As for present purposes it makes no difference whether one connects the idea with Herder, or with Lessing, or with Fichte (in his later period) and Hegel. By historicism I mean the notion of an Ideal, a Mission, a Destiny which can be found continuously unfolding in the life of a people (at least of the German people), in whose light the events which happen are to be understood, and by faithfulness to which a people stands condemned or justified.

This fourth conception is not, however, so much an addition to the other three factors as it is an expression of the way in which they are to be understood. For during the nineteenth century the ideas which were first applied to individuals were transferred to the state itself as an individual, and so gained a new meaning. The transfer is obvious in the case of the Kantian idea of duty. With Kant duty marked a connecting link between the individual and humanity; it expressed what was truly human and thus universal in man. But "humanity" is not yet organized. There are no social institutions in which humanity, as distinct from

local or national citizenship, is embodied. It expresses a mere rational ideal; something which is not realized, though it ought to be. Consequently Kant himself proclaimed that while men are to act from the motive of duty, duty is an empty notion. It has to get its filling, its specific subjectmatter, from empirical circumstance.

This may sound like a mere philosophical technicality. But it turned out otherwise. Kant thought of duty as a command; as, in his own words, an imperative. The essence of morality is obedience. That Kant thought of it as obedience to an abstract law of reason representing an ideal of an unrealized humanity, is evidence of his own noble aspirations. But human beings at large can hardly guide themselves by such remote abstractions. An identification of the essence of morality with obedience to law lends itself to an implicit acquiescence in whatever laws happen to impinge upon the individual. The modern age inherited from medieval thought the notion of morality as obedience to a sovereign command. As late as the seventeenth century, the central question of all political moral theory, even in England, was the legitimacy of resistance to constituted authority. In the eighteenth century, thought in England and France moved away from the medieval notion of obedience as central in morals. Kant was a means to fastening the idea upon German thought. The fact that he gave the idea a singularly elevated tone was just what enabled the idea to survive against the forces which everywhere else had undermined the identification of morality with obedience to the command of authority.

The merging of the idea of moral obligation into that of political obedience was furthered by the Germanic exaltation of the state. When the authority which demands acquiescent obedience is thought of as "the manifestation of the divine upon earth"; when, as in Professor Francke's words, the state is thought of as "an organism uniting in itself all spiritual and moral aspirations," it is only too easy to identify moral duty with political subservience. The ideal of a collective nation embodying a divine purpose in its historic development took captive the Kantian idea of duty; it replaced the endeavor of the isolated individual to realize in his own humble sphere the ideal of a law as broad as humanity. A cosmopolitan ideal, evolved in an agricultural, quasi-feudal,