“Ladies and Gentlemen: Four score and seven years ago your fathers
brought forth upon this continent 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 that the
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 to or detract. 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 to be 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 freedom, and that the government of
the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the
earth.”