home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863)
-
- Four score 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 can never forget
- what they did here. It is for us 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 these
- 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.