CALL FOR TODAY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 121, 18 November 1943, Page 4

CALL FOR TODAY

' 'OUT OF THE PAST

"THE TASK BEFORE US"

(By G. 0.) , Eighty, years ago, November 19, . a vast assemblage of people, includ- ; ing war-weary and wounded soldiers, stood on what, in a sense, was holy ground. Their centre of interest was a platform and they awaited those who should address them, and in the meanwhile listened to the singing of a great choir and the music of a military band. The time was forenoon, when a party of distinguished men ascended the platform. Among them were Ministers of State, Judges of the Supreme Court, heads of departments, and soldiers of high rank. There also was the chief citizen of those people, a very tall, loose-limbed man wearing ill-fitting clothes, awkward and ungainly in his deportment. But he outstood all on. that platform, not by lack of grace in his movements, but by the deep lineaments on his face revealing the agony of his soul. The scene.of this drama in a great nation's history was laid in what but six or seven months before had been peaceful, pleasant, undulating countryside of village, farm and church, orchards and wheat-fields, and cattle grazing in its meadows. But, alas! conflicting "ideologies" had turned it all into a field of blood. Ploughshares were forged into swords and reaping hooks beaten into spears, not for repelling foreign tyrants, but for the slaughter of men of their own families, nation, and common tongue —brother fought against brother, father against son, with unexcelled courage and indescribable ferocity. All talk, all hope of compromise had been abandoned and resort made to arms so that the ideology of the one should be forced on the other. So they fought for three whole days and nights until one side was vanquished, but not humiliated, at an awful sacrifice made by all of them. This tragic scene was enacted in an obscure country place in southern Pennsylvania, a place thereafter ever to be associated with the highest courage and fortitude displayed by men. The name of that place was Gettysburg. • * * • For some hours the crowd around the platform listened to the speakers, enthralled by brilliant rhetoric. The polished sentences and personality of Edward Everett, former .Ambassador to the Court of St. James, held the people spellbound for two hours as he reviewed the causes of the war and the roeaning of the great battle so recently fought out on that very spot; but although it listened enraptured by Everett's eloquence, it showed, at times, that it was not in complete agreement' with his sentiments. Nevertheless, the applause at the close of his oration was like the bursting of a mighty dam. When it had died down there was silence as the President, Abraham Lincoln, rose to speak and approached the rail. He lacked everything in the way of appearance, personal gifts, and attainments that Everett possessed. He began in a high-

pitched voice and barely a perceptible ripple of ridicule passed over the crowd. He noticed it, for he was deeply learned in the moods of crowds. He was conscious of the vivid contrast between Everett and himself, but too great a man to resent that difference. At the outset he seemed to feel (as he afterwards said he felt) that his speech was going to fail in its purpose. But he began:— 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 battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their liv<fs that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot 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 honoured dead we take in- . creased 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. # # # As the words "perish from the earth" died away on the still air of that November afternoon, it is recorded that fhe whole assemblage was dumb. There was no applause, no shouting, nothing louder than a profound, long-drawn sigh. The suspense was broken by a dirge sung by the choir. The ceremony was over; the crowd dispersed, the special train bore the distinguished party back to Washington and with it the President, weighed down with a sense of utter failure. * * « This speech and all that it meant was no mere off-hand utterance made for an occasion. On the contrary, its birth had been slow and painful. It had been written down with a bit of ; leadpencil on a piece of wrapping 1 paper as the train sped on its way to ; the Pennsylvania border. Its significance had been fully thought out and envisaged, but its effect on those who were to hear it could not be foreseen. Its sentences as they came to mind seemed ineloquent, commonplace, and dull. It had to be carved out of the granite, as it were. It was received in silence and awe, because every word of it came from the heart of a truly great and humble-minded man who felt every word of it himself. And yet he was constrained to say, ; afterwards, "I felt my dignity ought ; not to permit me to be a public 1 speaker." Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg, made ■ eighty years ago, has endured and will ; endure because it appeals now as 1 then to all men of worth in every | nation. It appeals with power to men now fighting and falling side by side in Italy, in Russia, in China, and in the jungles of Pacific isles. It appeals \ and ought to appeal to all men of ' worth living and working within their j own borders who, whatever their personal interests, idiosyncracies, or even ! ideologies may be, are honestly and , sincerely determined that Vheir J "nation, under God, shall have a new > birth of freedom," and "that, their j(people shall' not perish from thd I earth."