A Man for the Ages | Page 2

upon the story; how you found in Lincoln's words a prophecy
of the great struggle that has come. Since I have been steering my
imagination on its swift, long flights into the past I have been able to
recall the very words you used: "Lincoln said that a house divided
against itself must fall--that our nation could not endure part slave and
part free, and it was true. Since then the world has grown incredibly
small. The peoples of the earth have been drawn into one house and the
affairs of each are the concern of all. With a vain, boastful and
unscrupulous degenerate on the throne of Germany, it is likely to be a
house divided against itself and I fear a greater struggle than the world
has ever seen between the bond and the free. It will be a bloody contest
but of its issue there can be no doubt because the friends of freedom are
the children of light and are many. They will lay all they have upon its
altars. They will be unprepared and roughly handled for a time but their
reserves of material and moral strength which shall express themselves
in ready sacrifice, are beyond all calculation. Only one whose life spans
the wide area from Andrew Jackson to Woodrow Wilson and who has
stood with Lincoln in his lonely tower and watched the flowing of the
tides for three score years and ten, as I have, can be quite aware of the
perils and resources of Democracy."
All these and many other things which you have said to me, dear
grandfather, have helped me to understand this great thunderous drama
in which I have had a part. They have helped me to endure its perils
and bitter defeats. It was you who saw clearly from the first that this
was the final clash between the bond and the free--an effort of the great
house of God to purge itself, and you urged me to go to Canada and
enlist in the struggle. For this, too, I thank you. My wounds are dear to
me, knowing, as you have made me know, that I have come well by
them fighting not in the interest of Great Britain or France or Russia,
but in the cause of humanity. It is strange that among these men who
are fighting with me I have found only one or two who seem to have a
vision of the whole truth of this business.
Now I come to the point of my letter. I have an enlistment to urge upon
you in the cause of humanity and there are no wounds to go with it.
When I come home, as I shall be doing as soon as I am sufficiently

mended, we must go to work on the story of your life so that all who
wish to do so may know it as I know it. Let us go to it with all the
diaries that you and your father kept, aided by your memory, and give
to the world its first full view of the heart and soul of Lincoln. I have
read all the biographies and anecdotes of him and yet without the story
as you tell it he would have been a stranger to me. After this war, if I
mistake not, Democracy will command the interest of all men. It will
be the theme of themes. You tell me that we shall soon get into the
struggle and turn the scale. Well, if we do, we shall have to
demonstrate a swiftness of preparation and a power in the field which
will astonish the world, and when it is all over the world will want to
know how this potent Democracy of ours came about. The one
name--Lincoln--with the background of your story, especially the
background, for the trouble with all the biographies is a lack of
background--will be the best answer we could give I think. Of course
there are other answers, but, as there are few who dare to doubt, these
days, that Lincoln is the greatest democrat since Jesus Christ, if we can
only present your knowledge to the world we should do well. Again the
great crowd, whom you and I desire to enlighten if we can, do not read
biography or history save under the compulsion of the schools, so let us
try only to tell the moving story as you have told it to me, with Lincoln
striding across the scene or taking the center of the stage just as he was
wont to do in your recollection of him. So we will make them to know
the giant of Democracy without trying.
Duty calls. What is your answer? Please let me know by cable.
Meanwhile I shall be