Lincoln’s reputation as an orator was gradually extending beyond the circle of his friends and constituents.  He was gaining notice as a ready and forcible speaker, with shrewd and sensible ideas which he expressed with striking originality and independence.  He was invited to address the Young Men’s Lyceum at Springfield, January 27, 1837, and read a carefully prepared paper on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” which was afterwards published in the Springfield “Weekly Journal.”  The address was crude and strained in style, but the feeling pervading it was fervent and honest, and its patriotic sentiment and sound reflection made it effective for the occasion.  A few paragraphs culled from this paper, some of them containing remarkable prophetic passages, afford a clue to the stage of intellectual development which Lincoln had reached at the age of twenty-seven, and an interesting contrast with the terser style of his later years.

In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era.  We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.  We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us.  We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings.  We toiled not in the acquisition or establishment of them; they are a legacy bequeathed us by a once hardy, brave and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors.  Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and, through themselves, us, of this goodly land, and to uprear upon its hills and valleys a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ’tis ours only to transmit these—­the former unprofaned by the foot of an invader, the latter undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation—­to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know.  This task, gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.

How, then, shall we perform it?  At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?  Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow?  Never!  All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years!  At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected?  I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst ourselves.