Have affairs paused?  Does the Nation stand still?  Is what the fifty years have wrought since those days of battle finished, rounded out, and completed?  Here is a great people, great with every force that has ever beaten in the lifeblood of mankind.  And it is secure.  There is no one within its borders, there is no power among the nations of the earth, to make it afraid.  But has it yet squared itself with its own great standards set up at its birth, when it made that first noble, naive appeal to the moral judgment of mankind to take notice that a government had now at last been established which was to serve men, not masters?  It is secure in everything except the satisfaction that its life is right, adjusted to the uttermost to the standards of righteousness and humanity.  The days of sacrifice and cleansing are not closed.  We have harder things to do than were done in the heroic days of war, because harder to see clearly, requiring more vision, more calm balance of judgment, a more candid searching of the very springs of right.

Look around you upon the field of Gettysburg!  Picture the array, the fierce heats and agony of battle, column hurled against column, battery bellowing to battery!  Valor?  Yes!  Greater no man shall see in war; and self-sacrifice, and loss to the uttermost; the high recklessness of exalted devotion which does not count the cost.  We are made by these tragic, epic things to know what it costs to make a nation—­the blood and sacrifice of multitudes of unknown men lifted to a great stature in the view of all generations by knowing no limit to their manly willingness to serve.  In armies thus marshaled from the ranks of free men you will see, as it were, a nation embattled, the leaders and the led, and may know, if you will, how little except in form its action differs in days of peace from its action in days of war.

May we break camp now and be at ease?  Are the forces that fight for the Nation dispersed, disbanded, gone to their homes forgetful of the common cause?  Are our forces disorganized, without constituted leaders and the might of men consciously united because we contend, not with armies, but with principalities and powers and wickedness in high places?  Are we content to lie still?  Does our union mean sympathy, our peace contentment, our vigor right action, our maturity self-comprehension and a clear confidence in choosing what we shall do?  War fitted us for action, and action never ceases.

I have been chosen the leader of the Nation.  I cannot justify the choice by any qualities of my own, but so it has come about, and here I stand.  Whom do I command?  The ghostly hosts who fought upon these battlefields long ago and are gone?  These gallant gentlemen stricken in years whose fighting days, are over, their glory won?  What are the orders for them, and who rallies them?  I have in my mind another host, whom these set free of civil strife in order that they might work out in days of