I
While our great battleship fleet thundered peace and friendship to the
world, as it moved from sea to sea, stinging pens and voices in one
country after another answered that America had suddenly passed from
blustering youth to cynical old age, and that the harmless effrontery
of our nationality in the past was not to be confounded with the
cold-brained, organized, money-worshipping greed of the new generation
of Americans.
Meanwhile, in all parts of the American continent, preparations were
being made to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of
Abraham Lincoln, the humblest, simplest and plainest of our national
leaders, whose name no American can utter without emotion.
We think of Washington with pride, of Jefferson and Madison with
intellectual reverence, and of Jackson and Grant with grateful
consciousness of their strength.
But the memory of Lincoln, even now, so many years after his piteous
death, stirs the tenderest love of the nation, thrills it with a sense
of intimate relationship to his greatness and awakens a personal
affection in the average American’s breast--not a mere political
enthusiasm, but a peculiarly heartfelt sentiment that has no parallel
in human history.
If it be true that the nation has at once become old, that it has grown
sinister and corrupt, that it cringes before material success, stands
in awe of multi-millionaires and prostrates itself before money, why is
it that we love Lincoln?
If in the pride of wealth and strength we have forgotten our early
republican ideals of simple justice and manhood, how is it that the
movement to commemorate the birth of this lowly, clumsy backwoodsman
and frontier lawyer turned President--a movement begun in the rich
cities of New York and Chicago--instantly spread to the remotest
villages, and all that seemed ugly and haggard, with all that seemed
brave and fair and true, swarmed together, heart-naked, to make that
twelfth day of February an unforgetable event?
Arches and statues; flower-strewn streets with endless processions;
moving ceremonies in thousands of schools and colleges; multitudes
kneeling in churches; other multitudes listening to orators; warships
and fortresses roaring out salutes.
Yet these were the mere externals of Lincoln Day. The average American
does not shout when he hears Lincoln’s name. Even the political
demagogue, the stock gambler, the captain of industry, aye, the
sorriest scarecrow of a yellow journalist, is likely to grow silent and
reverential when that word is spoken.
With all our national levity, we do not jest about Lincoln. With all
our political divisions, every party to-day reveres his memory and
claims his spirit. It is sober truth to say that he struck the noblest,
highest, holiest note in the inmost native soul of the American people.
There is nothing so arrogant or sodden and sordid in that new paganism
which has set its altars in Wall Street but will in some sense uncover
and kneel at the sound of his name.
Our fleet, in its voyage around the world, found no record of such a
man in any of the lands of its visitations. Each nation, each epoch,
each race, has its hero. But there is none like Lincoln. Alexander,
Caesar, Napoleon, Cromwell--how cold their glory seems to his, how
immeasurably smaller their place in the affections of mankind?
And, while America was getting ready to honor Lincoln, none might
pretend to understand his people who had not first discovered what it
is in his character and in ours that, even in this day of restless
commercialism, makes us love him above comparison in the story of the
world’s great men--love him for his poverty, for his simplicity, for
his humanity, for his fidelity, for his justice, for his plainness, for
his life and for his death.
By sheer force of character, conscience-inspired, Abraham Lincoln rose
from abject depths of squalid environment to become the most august
figure in American history, and perhaps the most significant and
lovable personality in the annals of mankind.
In his amazing emergence to greatness from poverty and ignorance is
to be found a supreme demonstration and justification of American
institutions.
It was the common people who recognized the nobility and majesty in
this singular man. He understood that always, and, even in his days
of power, when great battles were fought at a nod of his head, and a
whisk of his pen set a whole race free, it kept him humble.
Perhaps the profoundly tender love which the American people have for
his memory is to be explained by the fact that in the secret recesses
where every man communes with the highest, bravest and most unselfish
elements of his own nature, the average American is an Abraham Lincoln
to himself.
The power to recognize is not so far removed from the power to be
recognized, and it is thrillingly significant, after all these dreary
years of babble about the omnipotence of money, that the same people
who raised Lincoln from penniless obscurity to his place of power and
martyrdom, still cherish his name and example with a depth of devotion
that increases with each year of national growth, confusing and
confounding the learned foreign critics of the Republic, who miss the
finest thing in American civilization when they fail to learn why we
love Lincoln.