FOOTNOTE:
[43] Delivered in the House of Commons, February 13, 1893.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
EMILIO CASTELAR
The past century has not, the century to come will not have, a figure so
grand as that of Abraham Lincoln, because as evil disappears so
disappears heroism also.
I have often contemplated and described his life. Born in a cabin of
Kentucky, of parents who could hardly read; born a new Moses in the
solitude of the desert, where are forged all great and obstinate
thoughts, monotonous like the desert, and growing up among those
primeval forests, which, with their fragrance, send a cloud of incense,
and, with their murmurs, a cloud of prayers to heaven; a boatman at
eight years in the impetuous current of the Ohio, and at seventeen in
the vast and tranquil waters of the Mississippi; later, a woodman, with
axe and arm felling the immemorial trees, to open a way to unexplored
regions for his tribe of wandering workers; reading no other book than
the Bible, the book of great sorrows and great hopes, dictated often by
prophets to the sound of fetters they dragged through Nineveh and
Babylon; a child of Nature; in a word, by one of those miracles only
comprehensible among free peoples, he fought for the country, and was
raised by his fellow-citizens to the Congress at Washington, and by the
nation to the Presidency of the Republic; and when the evil grew more
virulent, when those States were dissolved, when the slave-holders
uttered their war-cry and the slaves their groans of despair, humblest
of the humble before his conscience, greatest of the great before
history, ascends the Capitol, the greatest moral height of our time, and
strong and serene with his conscience and his thought; before him a
veteran army, hostile Europe behind him, England favoring the South,
France encouraging reaction in Mexico, in his hands the riven country;
he arms two millions of men, gathers half a million of horses, sends his
artillery twelve hundred miles in a week, from the banks of the Potomac
to the shores of the Tennessee; fights more than six hundred battles;
renews before Richmond the deeds of Alexander, of Caesar; and, after
having emancipated three million slaves, that nothing might be wanting,
he dies in the very moment of victory--like Christ, like Socrates, like
all redeemers, at the foot of his work.
Pages:
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399