THE
GETTYSBURG ADDRESS
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 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 lives 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 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.
Abraham
Lincoln
November
19, 1863
Based on the book, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in Translation,
Compiled by Roy P. Balser, The Library of Congress, Washington, 1972.
