Today, 19th November, however, is the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Here it is
“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 battlefield 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 cannot 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 honoured 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.”
It is not a pacifist speech, rather, like the poem of John Macrae I quoted for Remembrance Day, it is a call to arms to continue the fight.
But those words, “..that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” – don’t they send a shiver down your spine, nearly a century and a half later?
Now apply them to your new country, the European Union. We have failed Lincoln, haven’t we? We have walked, only half blindfolded, into rule by the unelected elite, which in the 18th century Lincoln’s forefathers emigrated to escape from.
Let us hope that in the 21st century we have got beyond fighting for freedom, but that we cherish freedom none the less.
It is not a pacifist speech, rather, like the poem of John Macrae I quoted for Remembrance Day, it is a call to arms to continue the fight.
But those words, “..that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” – don’t they send a shiver down your spine, nearly a century and a half later?
Now apply them to your new country, the European Union. We have failed Lincoln, haven’t we? We have walked, only half blindfolded, into rule by the unelected elite, which in the 18th century Lincoln’s forefathers emigrated to escape from.
Let us hope that in the 21st century we have got beyond fighting for freedom, but that we cherish freedom none the less.
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