Love This
Four
score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a
new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now
we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or
any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met
on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion
of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their
lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper
that we should do this.
But,
in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can
not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled
here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it
can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to
be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here
have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here
dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored
dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the
last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these
dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have
a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the
people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
This should be for every citizen of the United States of America