1 8 American Ideals 



tie communities, drifting toward the type of gov- 

 ernment prevalent in Spanish America. Without 

 Lincoln we might perhaps have failed to keep the 

 political unity we had won; and even if, as is pos- 

 sible, we had kept it, both the struggle by which 

 it was kept and the results of this struggle would 

 have been so different that the effect upon our na- 

 tional history could not have failed to be profound. 

 Yet the nation's debt to these men is not confined 

 to what it owes them for its material well-being, in- 

 calculable though this debt is. Beyond the fact that 

 we are an independent and united people, with half a 

 continent as our heritage, lies the fact that every 

 American is richer by the heritage of the noble deeds 

 and noble words of Washington and of Lincoln. 

 Each of us who reads the Gettysburg speech or the 

 second inaugural address of the greatest American 

 of the nineteenth century, or who studies the long 

 campaigns and lofty statesmanship of that other 

 American who was even greater, can not but feel 

 within him that lift toward things higher and nobler 

 which can never be bestowed by the enjoyment of 

 mere material prosperity. 



It is not only the country which these men helped 

 to make and helped to save that is ours by inheri- 

 tance ; we inherit also all that is best and highest in 

 their characters and in their lives. We inherit from 

 Lincoln and from the might of Lincoln's generation 

 not merely the freedom of those who once w r ere 

 slaves ; for we inherit also the fact of the freeing of 

 them; we inherit the glory and the honor and the 



