96 On the Campus 



acter in history, like many another; nevertheless, the 

 name of none other, that I know of, is greeted, whenever 

 mentioned, with such general, nay, universal, heartiness, 

 as if to tell of personal friendship and affection. 



For some reason Lincoln is our own, especially in 

 these prairie states. Our pioneer fathers knew him and 

 he knew them. He had little formal education. He 

 had no theories. The uncertainties of conflicting schools 

 of human thought cast no wavering shadows for his un- 

 clouded mind. He saw with absolute clearness the 

 simple facts of what proved a tremendous crisis in a 

 nation's life, and he never got beyond those facts. The 

 crisis and his life passed out together. 



He was poor. For that reason, if for no other, the 

 vast majority of men are on his side; he walked with 

 poverty all his life and took the chief place in the great 

 Republic of the world, having little, if any, property 

 beyond his simple residence in an unpaved prairie town ; 

 and yet the memory of this man and the ideals for 

 which he stood constitute, all unseen, a wealth greater 

 than all our docks and cars, our buildings fine, because 

 more vivifying and more enduring; in some way more 

 beautiful and more to be desired. 



I have nothing new to-day to add to the familiar an- 

 nals of the sixties or of the decade just before; all we 

 can likely ever know about our hero has long ago been 

 said and written; the story is not only familiar; it is 

 already old ; but OUR history is new, OUR destiny is just 

 now in the making, and perhaps in this quiet hour, on 

 this anniversary of Lincoln's birth, as our minds nat- 

 urally return to the days in which he lived, to the peo- 



