Gettysburg Address / Lincoln, Abraham

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, 1863
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        Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on
this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.

        Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.
We are met on a great battle field of that war.  We have come to
dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those
who here gave their lives that that nation might live.  It is
altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

        But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not
consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground.  The brave men living
and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor
power to add or detract.  The world will little note, nor long
remember, what we say here, but it will never forget what they did
here.  It is for this the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
advanced.  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task
remaining before us -- that from thse honored dead we take increased
devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of
devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have
died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth.

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