But in our country, we do not thus consciously formulate and express our national ideals.  We recognize them rather with averted face as the adolescent boy recognizes any virtue that he may possess, as if half-ashamed of his weakness.  We have monuments to our heroes, it is true, but they are often inaccessible, and as often they fail to convey in any adequate manner, the greatness of the lessons which the lives of these heroes represent.  Where Germany has a hundred or more impressive memorials to the genius of Bismarck, we have but one adequate memorial to the genius of Washington, while for Lincoln, who represents the typical American standards of life and conduct more faithfully than any other one character in our history, we have no memorial that is at all adequate,—­and we should have a thousand.  Some day our people will awake to the possibilities that inhere in these palpable expressions of the impalpable things for which our country stands.  We shall come to recognize the vast educative importance of perpetuating, in every possible way, the deep truths that have been established at the cost of so much blood and treasure.

To embody our national ideals in the personages of the great figures of history who did so much to establish them is the most elementary method of insuring their conservation and transmission.  We are beginning to appreciate the value of this method in our introductory courses of history in the intermediate and lower grammar grades.  The historical study outlined for these grades in most of our state and city school programs includes mainly biographical materials.  As long as the purpose of this study is kept steadily in view by the teacher, its value may be very richly realized.  The danger lies in an obscure conception of the purpose.  We are always too prone to teach history didactically, and to teach biographical history didactically is to miss the mark entirely.  The aim here is not primarily instruction, but inspiration; not merely learning, but also appreciation.  To tell the story of Lincoln’s life in such a way that its true value will be realized requires first upon the part of the teacher a sincere appreciation of the great lesson of Lincoln’s life.  Lincoln typifies the most significant and representative of American ideals.  His career stands for and illustrates the greatest of our national principles,—­the principle of equality,—­not the equality of birth, not the equality of social station, but the equality of opportunity.  That a child of the lowliest birth, reared under conditions apparently the most unfavorable for rich development, limited by the sternest poverty, by lack of formal education, by lack of family pride and traditions, by lack of an environment of culture, by the hard necessity of earning his own livelihood almost from earliest childhood,—­that such a man should attain to the highest station in the land and the proudest eminence in its history, and should have acquired from the apparently unfavorable environment of his early life the very qualities that made him so efficient in that station and so permanent in that eminence,—­this is a miracle that only America could produce.  It is this conception that the teacher must have, and this he must, in some measure, impress upon his pupils.