"On two tragic occasions, at a century's distance, the fate of this country has trembled in the balance: Would it be a free nation? Would it continue to be one nation? A leader was wanted on both occasions, a very different one in each case. This boon from above was granted to the American people, who had a Washington when a Washington was needed, and a Lincoln when a Lincoln could save them.

"Both had enemies, both had doubters, but both were recognized by all open-minded people, and above all, by the nation at large, as the men to shape the nation's destinies. When the Marquis de Chastellux came to America as chief of staff in the army of Rochambeau, his first thought was to go and see his friend Lafayette, and at the same time Washington. He has noted in his memoirs what were, on first sight, his impressions of the not yet victorious, not yet triumphant, not yet universally admired American patriot.

" 'I saw,' he said, 'M. de Lafayette walking in the yard with a tall man of 5 feet 9 inches, of noble mein and sweet face. It was the general himself. I dismounted, and soon felt myself at my ease by the side of the greatest and best of all men. All who meet him trust him, but no one is familiar with him, because the sentiment he inspires to all is ever the same cause: a profound esteem for his virtues and the highest opinion of his talents.' So wrote a foreigner who was not Lafayette, who suddenly found himself face to face with the great man. Any chance comer, any passerby would have been similarly impressed. He inspired confidence, and those who saw him felt that the fate of the country was safe in his hands.

"A century of almost unbroken prosperity had nearly elapsed when came the hour of the nation's second trial. Though it may seem to us a small matter compared with what we have seen since, the development had been considerable; the scattered colonies of yore had become a great nation, and now it seemed as if all was in doubt again; the nation was young, wealthy, powerful, prosperous; It had immense domains and resources; yet it seemed as if her fate would parallel those of old empires described by Tacitus, who, without foes, crumble to pieces under their own weight. Within her own frontiers, elements of destruction or disruption had been growing. Hatreds were embitterd among people equally brave, bold and sure of their rights. The edifices raised to Washington was trembling on its base; a catastrophe was at hand. Then it was that in the middle-sized, not yet world-famous town, Chicago by name, the republican convention, called there or the first time, met to choose a candidate for the presidency. It has met there again since, and has made, each time, a remarkable choice.

"In 1860 it chose a man whom my predecessor of those days, announcing the news to his government, described as 'a man almost unknown, Mr. Abraham Lincoln.' Almost unknown was he, indeed, at home as well as abroad, and the news of his selection was received with anxiety. My country, France, was then governed my Napoleon III, and all liberals had their eyes fixed on America. Your example was the great example that gave heart to our most progressive men. You had proved that republican government was possible, by having one. If it broke to pieces, so would the hopes of all those among us who expected that one day we would have the same. And the partisans of autocracy were loud in their assertions that a republic was well and good for a country without enemies or neighbors, but that, if a storm arose, it would be shattered. A storm arose, and the helm had been placed in the hands of that man almost unknown, Mr. Abraham Lincoln. 'We still remember,' wrote years later, the illustrious French writer, Prevost Paradol, 'the uneasiness with which we awaited the first words of that president then unknown, upon whom a heavy task had fallen, and from whose advent to power might be dated the ruin or regeneration of his country. All we knew was that he had sprung up from the humblest walks of life, that his youth had been spent in manual labor; that he had then risen by degrees in his town, in his country and in his state. What was this favorite of the people? Democratic societies are liable to errors which are fatal to them. But as soon as Mr. Lincoln had arrived in Washington, as soon as he spoke, all our doubts and fears were dissipated, and it seemed to us that fate itself had pronounced in favor of the good cause, since, in such an emergency, it had given to the country and honest man.

"The first words [the now famous inaugural address] had been for Prevost-Paradol and for millions of others, what a first glance at Washington had been for Chastellux, a revelation that the man was a man, a great and honest one, and that, once more, the fate of the country, at an awful period, had been placed in safe hands.

"Well indeed might people have wondered and felt anxious when they remembered how little training in great afairs the new ruler had had, and the incredible difficulties of the problems he would have to solve: to solve, his heart bleeding at the very thought, for he had to fight, not enemies, but friends. 'We must not be enemies.'No romance or adventure reads more like a romance than the true story of Lincoln's youth and of the wanderings of his family from Virginia to Kentucky, from Kentucky to Indiana, from Indiana to the newly-formed state of Illinois having first to clear a part of the forest to build a doorless, windowless cabin, with one room for all the uses of them all; Lincoln, the grandson of a man killed by the Indians, the son of a father who never succeeded in anything, and whose utmost literary accomplishment consisted in signing with great difficulty, his own name - an accomplishment he had in common with the father of Shakespeare; the whole family leading a sort of life in comparison with which that of Robinson Crusoe was one of sybaritic enjoyment. That in those treeless, neighborless, bookless parts of the country he could learn and educate himself was the first great wonder of his life; it showed, once more, that learning does not so much depend upon the master's teaching as upon the pupil's desire.

"But no book, no school, no talk with refined men would have taught him what his rough life did. Confronted every day and every hour of the day with problems which had to be solved, he got the habit of seeing, deciding and acting by himself. Accostomed from childhood to live surrounded by the unknown, and meet the unexpected, his soul learned to be astonished at nothing, and instead of losing any time in wondering, to seek at once a way out of the difficulty. What the forest, what the swamp, what the river taught Lincoln cannot be overestimated. After long years of it, and shorter years at long-vanished New Salem, here at Springfield, at Vandalia, the former capital, where he met some descendents of his precursors in the forest, the French 'Couereurs de bole', almost suddenly he found himself transferred to the post of greatest honor and greatest danger. And what then would say the 'man almost unknown', the 'backwoodsman of yesterday,' What would he say? What did he say? - THE RIGHT THING.

"He was accustomed not to be surprised, but to decide and act. And so, confronted with circumstances which were so extraordinary as to be new to all, he was the man least astonished in the government. His rough and shrewd instinct proved of better avail than the clever minds of his more refined and better instructed seconds. It was Lincoln's instinct which checked Seward's complicated schemes and dangerous calculations. Lincoln could not calculate so cleverly, but he could guess better.

"His instinct, his good sense, his personal disinterestedness, his warmth of heart for both friend and foe, his high alms, led him through the awful years of anguish and bloodshed during which, ceaslessly, increased the number of fields decked with tombs, and no one knew whether there would be one powerful nation or two weaker ones, the odds were so great. They led him through the worst and through the best hours, and that of triumph found him none other than what he had ever been before, a man of duty, the devoted servant of his country, with deeper furrows on his face, and more melancholy in his heart. And so, after having saved the nation, he went to his doom, and fell, as he had long forseen, a victum to the cause for which he had fought.

"The emotion caused by the event was immense. Among my compatriots, part were for the south, part for the north; they should not be blamed; it was the same in America. But the whole of those who had liberal ideas, the bulk of the nation, considered neither north nor south, and thought only whether the republic would survive and continue a great republic, or be shattered to pieces. The efforts of Lincoln to preserve the union were followed with keen anxiety and the fervent hope that he would succeed.

"When the catastrophe happened there were no more differences and the whole French nation was united in feeling. From the emperor and empress who telegraphed to Mrs. Lincoln to the humblest workman, the emotion was the same, a wave of sympathy covered the country, such a one as was never seen. A subscription was opened to have a medal struck and a copy in gold presented to Mrs. Lincoln. In order that it might be a truly national offering, it was decided that no one would be permitted to subscribe more than two cents. The neccessary money was collected in an instant, and the medal was struck, bearing these memorable words: 'Dedicated by French democracy to Lincoln, honest man, who abolished slavery, re-established the union, saved the republic, without veiling the statue of Liberty.'

"The French press was unanimous; from the royalist Gazette de France to the liberal Journal des Debais, came forth the same expression of admiration and sorrow. 'A Christian,' said the Gazette de France, 'has just ascended before the throne of the final judge, accompanied by the souls of four millions of slaves created like ours in the image of God, and who have been endowed with freedom by a word from him.' Prevost-Paradol, a member of the French academy and a prominent liberal, wrote: 'The political instinct which made enlightened Frenchmen interested in the maintenance of the American power, more and more necessary to the equllibrium of the world, the desire to see a great democratic state surmount terrible trials and continue to give an example of the most perfect liberty united with the most absolute equality, assured the cause of the north with a number of friends among us. Lincoln was in deed an honest man, giving to the word its full meaning, or rather the sublime sense which belongs to it, when honesty was to contend with the severest trials which can agitate states, and with events which have influence on the fate of the world. Mr. Lincoln had but one object in view from the day of his election to that of his death, namely, the fulfillment of his duty, and his imagination never carried him beyond it. He has fallen at the very foot of the alter, covering it with his blood. But his work was done, and the spectacle of a rescued republic was what he could look upon with with consolation when his eyes were closing in death. Moreover, he has not lived for his country alone, since he leaves to everyone in the world to whom liberty and justice are dear, a great remembrance and a pure example.'

"When, in a log cabin of Kentucky, a hundred years ago this day, that child was born who was named after his grandfather killed by the Indians, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon I swayed Europe, Jefferson was president of the United States, and the second war of independence had not yet come to pass. It seems all very remote. But the memory of the great man whom we try to honor today is as fresh in everybody's mind as if he had only just left us. 'It is,' says Plutarch, 'the fortune of all good men that their virtue rises in glory after their death, and that the envy which any evil man may have conceived against them never survives the envious.' Such was the fate of Abraham Lincoln."

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