trusted as safe and strong and lasting, it is not to be wondered that people turn anew the pages of Lincoln's story. In very truth, his soul is marching on. To him it has been given to leave a living heritage of vital power and supreme inspiration to the race. Out of Lincoln came the proof that lofty achievement is not in ideals alone, but in that spiritual and material justice which is the wholesome blending of infinite purpose and man's capacity for fulfillment.

I spoke a moment ago of the multiplicity of present day writings about Lincoln. They embrace everything from the genealogist's delvings into his ancestry, to the psychologist's and the moralist's searchings into his innermost motives and objectives. Nothing that might possibly reveal any phase of his life and work has been accounted trivial. We are coming year by year to a more truthful and understanding appraisal of him. But all the researches of scholars and efforts of students have brought us little store of real understanding, have taught us well-high nothing concerning the supreme providential purpose which permits such a light to shine now and then upon a generation of men. We know not whence come such great souls, such simple wisdom, such capacity for sacrifice and service. But we do know that as men contemplate this strange career and study its wonders and its lessons, they are at least planting in their minds and hearts a certain vague realization of what Lincoln was and meant; a consciousness of his personal significance to them; and with all this, a keen aspiration for some little participation in such a bestowal of selflessness, sacrifice and service as was the life of Lincoln. That aspiration, I firmly believe, is fixed in a greater number of human hearts to-day than it ever was before. It may be somewhat vague and unformed, yet we readily recognize that it represents something like the aspirations of a race for a new incarnation of the spirit and the leadership of Lincoln.

Doubtless it is vain to hope that another such as he will be given to us and to our time. But to the extent that we shall prove ourselves worthy of such a leader, to that extent we shall be the better able to save ourselves without him. The task which men face throughout the world now is one with which they must cope as God intended. Their hope, their salvation,

their destiny, must at last be in their own hands. They will save themselves if they will forget themselves. Probably the task would be less difficult if humanity would get a little nearer to God. In times like these, the fullest, truest service that any nation or society can render to itself, will be the service which is conceived in unselfishness and rendered without thought of immediate gain, or of ultimate personal advantage.

We drink from memory, we find inspiration in example, we are exalted by the eternal truths which Lincoln saw and proclaimed, but the highest usefulness in these things is their practical preservation, so as to reveal to all the people a true understanding of Lincoln's transcending eminence. His supreme gift was not in construction, his was the master preservation. And the call of the world to-day is for preservation, for the preserved civilization which is the best judgment of human intelligence since the world began.

Our coming together to-night is due, in large part, to the interest of the sponsors for such an institution as Lincoln would have loved. The Lincoln Memorial University has truly been called a living memorial to the emancipator. It was founded in pursuance of his expressed desire that the light of learning might be carried to the people of that strangely sequestered, mountain community of which his own forbears were members. These people of the southern Appalachian empire number now some six millions. They constitute one of the world's greatest reservoirs of purest Anglo-Saxon stock. Pioneers from the day of the first colonial movement away from the tide-water country, they passed over into the mountains to make their homes, and there they and their descendants have lived, curiously, almost unaccountably aloof from the sweeping tide, the quickening life of those mighty migrations which subdued the continent and made our country. Remote from the outside world, wellnigh forgotten in the activities of the generations that laid down our highways of steel, they have been at times almost a mystery to us. Sturdy, hardy, independent and self-sufficient, they have lived generation after generation almost to themselves. But not quite; for it stands to the everlasting credit of these men and women of the mountains, that in every time of national need they have been instant in response and mag

nificent in loyalty. Their sons have stood in thousands against the barbarians of our own wilderness, they battled for Lincoln's concept of union and nationality and with equal steadfastness they have taken their place on battlegrounds of Europe and contributed their heroic part that a world civilization might live. The nation owes to them a vast balance of obligation, and the Lincoln Memorial University represents one installment which devout and unselfish people are paying upon that debt.

It is a strange circumstance that in the rush and eagerness of our continental conquest, such a people as this should, almost by accident, have drifted into the backwaters, and there remain while the surging currents of settlement and development left them generation after generation well-high untouched and forgotten. To-day they number a population double that of the thirteen colonies on the day when they declared independence; the greatest single reserve in all the land, of untainted, unmixed, pure and pristine American stock. Out of the loins of this community came to us Lincoln, in limb and lineament, in physical and moral power, in moral and mental ruggedness, a very prototype of his own people. From the nation which owes to them its debt for Lincoln and for a myriad of humbler heroes, now most of them forgot, it is due that the nation should light the way, should fire the beacons to guide this people into the ways of ample education and of ripened opportunity to make their full contribution to the national advancement. It has been told that nowhere in our country is illiteracy among Anglo-Saxons so prevalent, so dominant as among these people of the mountains. To state the fact is to confess remissness. It is a condition which must not be permitted to continue. For the sake of Lincoln, who loved them as his own people; for the sake of ourselves, who will be the equal beneficiaries of their advancement; for the sake of these splendid, loyal unquestioning Americans of the truest strain our nation knows, it is our duty to hold up the hands of the men and women who are carrying on this work of education, who have lighted this lamp of inspiration and leadership for the men and women who have already given and may give again immeasurably to American greatness and the growing glory of the republic.

BENJAMIN HARRISON

THE UNION OF STATES

Speech of Benjamin Harrison at the thirteenth annual dinner of the New England Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, December 22, 1893. In proposing the first toast, "The President of the United States," the chairman, Charles Emory Smith, said: "Gentlemen, I ask you to join me, at this time, in drinking a toast to the health of the illustrious patriot, who is as greatly respected and honored in private life as he was in the PresidencyGeneral Benjamin Harrison, whom I now have the pleasure of presenting to you." General Harrison's "Inaugural Address" is given in Volume XI.

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA:-When my good friend and your good neighbor and president, Mr. Charles Emory Smith, invited me to be present to-night, I felt a special demand upon me to yield to his request. I thought I owed him some reparation for appointing him to an office the emoluments of which did not pay his expenses. [Merriment.] Your cordial welcome to-night crowns three days of most pleasurable stay in this good city of Philadelphia. The days have been a little crowded; I think there have been what our friends of The Four Hundred would probably call "eight distinct functions"; but your cordiality and the kind words of your presiding officer quite relieve my fatigue and suggest to me that I shall rightly repay your kindness by making a very short speech. ["No, no!"] It is my opinion that these members of the New England Society are very creditable descendants of the Forefathers. I'm not quite sure that the Forefathers would share this opinion if they were here; but that would be by reason of the fact that, notwithstanding the load of substantial virtues, which they carried through life, their taste had not been highly cultivated.

I dread this function which I am now attempting to discharge more than any other that confronts me in life. The after-dinner speaker, unlike the poet, is not born-he is made. I am frequently compelled to meet in disastrous competition some dinner-table gentlemen who have already had their speeches set up in the newspaper offices. They are given to you as if they were fresh from the lip; you are served with what they would have you believe to be "impromptu boned turkey"; and yet, if you could see into the recesses of their intellectual kitchen, you would see the days of careful preparation which have been given to these spontaneous utterances. The after-dinner speaker needs to find somewhere some unworked joker's quarry, where some jokes have been left without a label on them; he needs to acquire the art of seeming to pluck, as he goes along in the progress of his speech, as by the wayside, some flower of rhetoric. He seems to have passed it and to have plucked it casually-but it is a boutonnière with tin foil round it. [Laughter.] You can see, upon close inspection, the mark of the planer on his well-turned sentences. Now, the competition with gentlemen who are so cultivated is severe upon one who must speak absolutely upon the impulse of the occasion. It is either incapacity or downright laziness that has kept me from competing in the field I have described.

It occurred to me to-day to inquire why you had to associate six States in order to get up a respectable Society. My friend Halstead [Murat Halstead] and I have no such trouble. We are Ohio-born, and we do not need to associate any other State in order to get up a good Society, wherever there is a civil list of the Government. If you would adopt the liberal charter method of the Ohio Society, I have no doubt you could subdivide yourselves into six good societies. The Ohio Society admits to membership everybody who has lived voluntarily six months in Ohio. No involuntary resident is admitted.

But the association of these States and the name of "New England" is a part of an old classification of the States which we used to find in the geography, and all of that classification has gone except New England and the South. "The West" has disappeared and "the Middle States" cannot be identified. Where is "the West"? Why, just now it is at the point of that