Where could the head of government in any monarchy be smitten down by the hand of an assassin, and the funds not quiver or fall one-half of one per cent?  After a long period of national disturbance, after four years of drastic war, after tremendous drafts on the resources of the country, in the height and top of our burdens, the heart of this people is such that now, when the head of government is stricken down, the public funds do not waver, but stand as the granite ribs in our mountains.

Republican institutions have been vindicated in this experience as they never were before; and the whole history of the last four years, rounded up by this cruel stroke, seems, in the providence of God, to have been clothed, now, with an illustration, with a sympathy, with an aptness, and with a significance, such as we never could have expected nor imagined.  God, I think, has said, by the voice of this event, to all nations of the earth, “Republican liberty, based upon true Christianity, is firm as the foundation of the globe.”

Even he who now sleeps has, by this event, been clothed with new influence.  Dead, he speaks to men who now willingly hear what before they refused to listen to.  Now his simple and weighty words will be gathered like those of Washington, and your children and your children’s children shall be taught to ponder the simplicity and deep wisdom of utterances which, in their time, passed, in party heat, as idle words.  Men will receive a new impulse of patriotism for his sake and will guard with zeal the whole country which he loved so well.  I swear you, on the altar of his memory, to be more faithful to the country for which he has perished.  They will, as they follow his hearse, swear a new hatred to that slavery against which he warred, and which, in vanquishing him, has made him a martyr and a conqueror.  I swear you, by the memory of this martyr, to hate slavery with an unappeasable hatred.  They will admire and imitate the firmness of this man, his inflexible conscience for the right, and yet his gentleness, as tender as a woman’s, his moderation of spirit, which not all the heat of party could inflame, nor all the jars and disturbances of his country shake out of place.  I swear you to an emulation of his justice, his moderation, and his mercy.

You I can comfort; but how can I speak to that twilight million to whom his name was as the name of an angel of God?  There will be wailing in places which no minister shall be able to reach.  When, in hovel and in cot, in wood and in wilderness, in the field throughout the South, the dusky children, who looked upon him as that Moses whom God sent before them to lead them out of the land of bondage, learn that he has fallen, who shall comfort them?  O, thou Shepherd of Israel, that didst comfort thy people of old, to thy care we commit the helpless, the long-wronged, and grieved.