It is likely that in a society ordered otherwise than our own Lincoln could not have found himself or the path of fame and power upon which he walked serenely to his death.  In this place it is right that we should remind ourselves of the solid and striking facts upon which our faith in democracy is founded.  Many another man besides Lincoln has served the nation in its highest places of counsel and of action whose origins were as humble as his.  Though the greatest example of the universal energy, richness, stimulation, and force of democracy, he is only one example among many.  The permeating and all-pervasive virtue of the freedom which challenges us in America to make the most of every gift and power we possess every page of our history serves to emphasize and illustrate.  Standing here in this place, it seems almost the whole of the stirring story.

Here Lincoln had his beginnings.  Here the end and consummation of that great life seem remote and a bit incredible.  And yet there was no break anywhere between beginning and end, no lack of natural sequence anywhere.  Nothing really incredible happened.  Lincoln was unaffectedly as much at home in the White House as he was here.  Do you share with me the feeling, I wonder, that he was permanently at home nowhere?  It seems to me that in the case of a man,—­I would rather say of a spirit,—­like Lincoln the question where he was is of little significance, that it is always what he was that really arrests our thought and takes hold of our imagination.  It is the spirit always that is sovereign.  Lincoln, like the rest of us, was put through the discipline of the world,—­a very rough and exacting discipline for him, an indispensable discipline for every man who would know what he is about in the midst of the world’s affairs; but his spirit got only its schooling there.  It did not derive its character or its vision from the experiences which brought it to its full revelation.  The test of every American must always be, not where he is, but what he is.  That, also, is of the essence of democracy, and is the moral of which this place is most gravely expressive.

We would like to think of men like Lincoln and Washington as typical Americans, but no man can be typical who is so unusual as these great men were.  It was typical of American life that it should produce such men with supreme indifference as to the manner in which it produced them, and as readily here in this hut as amidst the little circle of cultivated gentlemen to whom Virginia owed so much in leadership and example.  And Lincoln and Washington were typical Americans in the use they made of their genius.  But there will be few such men at best, and we will not look into the mystery of how and why they come.  We will only keep the door open for them always, and a hearty welcome,—­after we have recognized them.