MR. ROOT'S SPEECH.
VVE are delighted to have the opportunity of setting before or readers not only in this country but in the British Empire and the United States Mr. Root's speech at the unveiling of the Lincoln Statue—one of the most memorable speeches ever made even within the great oratorical ambit of St. Stephen's. It is owing to the personal kindness of Mr. Root that we are enabled to publish the speech in its complete form :— By authority of His Majesty's Government, a statue of an American has been set up in the Canning Enclosure—where on one side Westminster Abbey and on another the Houses of Parliament look down upon it ; where it is surrounded by memorials of British statesmen whose lives are inseparable parts in the history of the Kingdom and of the Empire ; and where the living tides of London will ebb and flow about it. The statue is the work of Augustus St. Gaudens, son of a French father, native of Ireland, and greatest of American sculptors. The American commemorated is Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States. In behalf of the American donors, I now formally present the statue to the British people.
Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12th, one hundred and eleven years ago, in a log cabin among the mountains of the State of Kentucky. He came into a frontier life of comparative poverty, labour, hardship, and rudo adventure. He had little instruction and few books. He had no friends among the great and powerful of his time. An equal among equals in the crude simplicity of scattered communities on the borders of the wilder- ness, he rose above the common level by force of his own qualities. He was sent by his neighbours to the State Legislature, where he learned the rudiments of government. He was sent to the Congress at Washington, where he broadened his conceptions to national scope. He was admitted to the bar and won high place as a successful and distinguished advocate. He became con- vinced of the wickedness of African slavery, that baleful institu- tion which the defective humanity of our fathers permitted to be established in the American Colonies. He declared his con- viction that slavery was eternally wrong with power and insistence that compelled public attention. He gave voice to the awakened conscience of the North. He led in the struggle for freedom against slavery. Upon that issue he was elected President. In that cause, as President, he conducted a great war of four years' duration in which millions of armed men were engaged. When in his wise judgment the time was ripe for it, then upon his own responsibility, in the exercise of his authority as Commander-in-Chief, invoking the support of his country, the considerate judgment of mankind, and the blessing of God upon his act, he set free the three million slaves by his official proclamation and dedicated the soil of American for ever as the home of a united liberty-loving commonwealth.
The act was accepted ; it was effective ; African slavery was ended ; the war was won—for union and for freedom ; and in the very hour of victory the great emancipator fell at the hand of a crazed fanatic. It was not chance or favourable circum- stance that achieved Lincoln's success. The struggle was long and desperate and often appeared hopeless. He won through the possession of the noblest qualities of manhood. He was simple, honest, sincere, and unselfish. He had high courage for action and fortitude in adversity. Never for an instant did the thought of personal advantage compete with the interests of the public cause. He never faltered in the positive and unequivocal declaration of the wrong of slavery, but his sympathy with all his fellow-men was so genuine, his knowledge of human nature was so just, that he was able to lead his countrymen without dogmatism or imputation of assumed superiority. He carried the Civil War to its successful conclusion with inflexible deter- mination; but the many evidences of his kindness of heart towards the people of the South and of his compassion for distress and suffering were the despair of many of his sub- ordinates ; and the effect of his humanity and considerate spirit upon the conduct of the war became one of the chief reasons why, when the war was over, North and South were able during the same generation to join again in friendship as citizens of a restored Union.
It would be difficult to conceive of a sharper contrast in all the incidental and immaterial things of life than existed between Lincoln and the statesmen whose statues stand in Parliament Square. He never set foot on British soil. His life was lived and his work was wholly done in a far distant land. He differed in manners and in habits of thought and speech. He never seemed to touch the life of Britain. Yet, the contrast but emphasizes the significance of the statue standing where it does. Put aside superficial differences, accidental and unimportant, and Abraham Lincoln appears in the simple greatness of his life, his character and his service to mankind, a representative of the deep and underlying qualities of his race—the qualities that great emergencies reveal, unchangingly the same in every continent ; the qualities to which Britain owed her life in the terrible years of the last decade ; the qualities that have made both Britain and America great. He was of English blood ; and he has brought enduring honour to the name. Every child of English sires should learn the story and think with pride, "Of such stuff as this are we English made." He was of English speech. The English Bible and English Shakespeare, studied in the intervals of toil and by the flare of the log fire in the frontier cabin, were the bases of his education ; and from them he gained, through greatness of heart and fine intelligence, the
power of expression to give his Gettysburg address and his Second Inaugural a place among the masterpieces of English prose. He was imbued with the conceptions of justice and liberty that the people of Britain had been working out in struggle and sacrifice since before Magna Charta—the conceptions for which Chatham and Burke and Franklin and Washington stood together, a century and a-half ago, when the battle for British liberty was fought and won for Britain, as well as for America on the other side of the Atlantic. These conceptions of justice and liberty have been the formative power that has - brought all Ameriea, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, to order its life according to the course of the common law, to assert its popular sovereignty through representative government— Britain's great gift to the political science of the world—and to establish the relation of individual citizenship to the State, on the basis of inalienable rights which governments are established to secure.
It is the identity of these fundamental conceptions in both countries which makes it impossible that in any great world emergency Britain and America can be on opposing sides. These conceptions of justice and liberty are the breath of life for both. While they prevail both nations will endure ; if they perish both nations will die. These were Lincoln's inheritance ; and when he declared that African slavery was eternally wrong and gave his life to end it, he was responding to impulses born in him from a long line of humble folk, as well in England as in America, who were themselves a product of the age-long struggles for the development of Anglo-Saxon freedom. The true heart of Britain understood him while he lived. We remember the Lancashire workmen brought into poverty and suffering through lack of cotton. When the Emancipation Proclamation had dispelled all doubt as to the real nature of the struggle in America, six thousand of them met in a great hall in Manchester and sent to President Lincoln a message of sympathy and support. This was his answer :—
"Under these circumstances, I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. It is indeed an energetic and reinspiring assurance of the inherent power of truth, and the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity, and freedom. I do not doubt that the sentiments you have expressed will be sustained by your great nation, and on the other hand I have no hesitation in assuring you that they will excite admiration, esteem, and the most reciprocal feelings of friendship among tho American people. I hail this interchange of sentiment, therefore, as an augury, that, whatever else may happen, whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exist between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual."
We may disregard all the little prejudices and quarrels that result from casual friction and pinpricks and from outside mis- representations and detraction, and rest upon Lincoln's unerring judgment of his countrymen and his race. We may be assured from him that whenever trials come, whenever there is need for assurance of the inherent power of truth and the triumph of justice, humanity and freedom, then peace and friendship between Britain and America will prove to be, as Lincoln desired to make them, perpetual. This man, full of sorrows, spoke not merely for the occasions and incidents of his own day. He expressed the deepest and holiest feelings of his race for all time. Listen to the words of his Second Inaugural :— " Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may soon pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in ; to bind up the nation's wounds ; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and for his orphan ; to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."
Consider this letter which he wrote to Mrs. Bixby, of Boston :—
" I have been shown on the file of the War Department a statement of the adjutant-general of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming ; but I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."
More than half a century has passed, but is this the voice of a stranger to the men and women of Britain in these later years Because under the direct tests of national character, in the stress of supreme effort and sacrifice, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the souls of both Britain and America prove themselves of kin to the soul of Abraham Lincoln, friendship between us is safe, and the statue of Lincoln the American stands as of right before the old Abbey where sleep the great of Britain's history.
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