[Address delivered September 4, 1916, on the acceptance of a deed of
gift to the Nation, by the Lincoln Farm Association, of the Lincoln
Birthplace Farm, at Hodgenville, Kentucky.]
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 circumstances 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 Lincoln had his beginnings. Here 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 nearby 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 to-day, 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. Its 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.