MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS : " OUR NATIVE LAND " 457

and vibrant—they need to be reinforced by what our hymn
''America the Beautiful" refers to as our " brotherhood . . . from
sea to shining sea."

Throughout the greater part of my life I have followed two little
personal traditions. The first began in early youth and I carried it
into our family, and when our children began to grow up and we
returned from time to time to our country from abroad, we used to
take those four little girls of ours to the bow of the liner just as we
passed the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour, and together we
recited those burning lines of Scott which Edward Everett Hale,
who in fact married us, had used so poignantly in his book The Man
Without a Country :

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said:
" This is my own, my native land; "
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burtfd
As home his footsteps he hath turrfd
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell ;
High though his titles, proud his fame,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,
Despite his titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.

The other little tradition of which I speak is to repeat every Memorial
Day the Gettysburg Address, and to-day I should like to take this
moment, while with you all, to do so, for I know of nothing ever
written in the English language that can surpass it in the sheer beauty
and inspiration of its diction. No doubt you know how it was
prepared and delivered. The weary and harassed President made his
rough notes for the address on the back of an old envelope while
going down to Gettysburg in the train, and that night, while in the
hotel, he put the speech into shape. At the meeting on the battlefield
the next day, November 19, 1863, he was preceded by one of the
foremost speakers of our country, who indulged at great length
in the then customary flight of oratory. And when Lincoln, gaunt
and ungainly, arose, spoke for but two or three minutes and then
sat down, the audience was amazed and bitterly disappointed that
on such an occasion they should have been deprived of the long
bursts of grandiloquence to which they were accustomed and which
they had eagerly awaited. The anti-climax after the preceding
oration and the aJtoiost total absence of applause were pitiable. Even
Lincoln himself believed that the address had|been a woeful failure.