Modern American Prose Selections | Page 3

Edith Rickert, Mr. Carl Becker, Mr. Ralph D.
Paine, Mr. Burton J. Hendrick, Mr. Philip Littell, and Mr. Bliss Perry
have freely accorded permission to reprint the selections that bear their
names. Mrs. Jacob A. Riis and Mr. R. W. Riis have courteously granted
the use of the excerpt from The Making of an American. The editors of
The New Republic and the editors of The University of Virginia Alumni
Bulletin have kindly consented to the reprinting of articles that
originally appeared in their periodicals. To Mr. Will D. Howe, whose
assistance has been constant and invaluable, the editor would extend
his hearty thanks.

MODERN AMERICAN PROSE SELECTIONS

ABRAHAM LINCOLN[1]
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
[Footnote 1: Address delivered at Lincoln's birthplace, Hodgenville,
Ky., Feb. 12, 1909. Reprinted from Collier's Weekly, issue of Feb. 13,
1909. By permission. Copyright, 1909, P. F. Collier & Son Co.]
We have met here to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of
one of the two greatest Americans; of one of the two or three greatest
men of the nineteenth century; of one of the greatest men in the world's
history. This rail-splitter, this boy who passed his ungainly youth in the
dire poverty of the poorest of the frontier folk, whose rise was by weary

and painful labor, lived to lead his people through the burning flames
of a struggle from which the nation emerged, purified as by fire, born
anew to a loftier life.
After long years of iron effort, and of failure that came more often than
victory, he at last rose to the leadership of the Republic, at the moment
when that leadership had become the stupendous world-task of the time.
He grew to know greatness, but never ease. Success came to him, but
never happiness, save that which springs from doing well a painful and
a vital task. Power was his, but not pleasure. The furrows deepened on
his brow, but his eyes were undimmed by either hate or fear. His gaunt
shoulders were bowed, but his steel thews never faltered as he bore for
a burden the destinies of his people. His great and tender heart shrank
from giving pain; and the task allotted him was to pour out like water
the life-blood of the young men, and to feel in his every fibre the
sorrow of the women. Disaster saddened but never dismayed him.
As the red years of war went by they found him ever doing his duty in
the present, ever facing the future with fearless front, high of heart, and
dauntless of soul. Unbroken by hatred, unshaken by scorn, he worked
and suffered for the people. Triumph was his at the last; and barely had
he tasted it before murder found him, and the kindly, patient, fearless
eyes were closed forever.
As a people we are indeed beyond measure fortunate in the characters
of the two greatest of our public men, Washington and Lincoln. Widely
though they differed in externals, the Virginia landed gentleman and
the Kentucky backwoodsman, they were alike in essentials, they were
alike in the great qualities which made each able to do service to his
nation and to all mankind such as no other man of his generation could
or did render. Each had lofty ideals, but each in striving to attain these
lofty ideals was guided by the soundest common sense. Each possessed
inflexible courage in adversity, and a soul wholly unspoiled by
prosperity. Each possessed all the gentler virtues commonly exhibited
by good men who lack rugged strength of character. Each possessed
also all the strong qualities commonly exhibited by those towering
masters of mankind who have too often shown themselves devoid of so

much as the understanding of the words by which we signify the
qualities of duty, of mercy, of devotion to the right, of lofty
disinterestedness in battling for the good of others.
There have been other men as great and other men as good; but in all
the history of mankind there are no other two great men as good as
these, no other two good men as great. Widely though the problems of
to-day differ from the problems set for solution to Washington when he
founded this nation, to Lincoln when he saved it and freed the slave,
yet the qualities they showed in meeting these problems are exactly the
same as those we should show in doing our work to-day.
Lincoln saw into the future with the prophetic imagination usually
vouchsafed only to the poet and the seer. He had in him all the lift
toward greatness of the visionary, without any of the visionary's
fanaticism or egotism, without any of the visionary's narrow jealousy of
the practical man and inability to strive in practical fashion for the
realization of an ideal. He had