Of that generation of men to whom we owe so much, the man to whom we owe most is, of course, Lincoln.

Valor, energy, disinterestedness, idealism—all these were his; and his also was that lofty and far-seeing wisdom which alone could make the valor, the disinterestedness, the energy, the idealism, of service to the Republic.

Here again, in meeting the problems of to-day, let us profit by, and welcome, and co-operate with the John Browns; but let us also remember that the problems can really be solved only if we approach them in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln.

John Brown prepared the way; but if the friends of freedom and union had surrendered themselves to his leadership, the cause of freedom and union would have been lost.

In our struggle to-day we can study Lincoln’s career purely as an example to emulate; we can study John Brown’s career partly as such an example, but partly also as a warning.

I think such study is especially necessary for the extremists among the very men with whom my own sympathy is especially keen.

I am a progressive; I could not be anything else; indeed, as the years go by I become more, and not less, radically progressive.

To my mind the failure resolutely to follow progressive policies is the negation of democracy as well of progress, and spells disaster.

But for this very reason I feel concern when progressives act with heedless violence, or go so far and so fast as to invite reaction.

The liberty of the slave was desirable, but it was not to be brought about by a slave insurrection.

The better distribution of property is desirable, but it is not to be brought about by the anarchic form of Socialism which would destroy all private capital and tend to destroy all private wealth.

It represents not progress, but retrogression, to propose to destroy capital because the power of unrestrained capital is abused.

These problems have to do with securing a more just and generally widespread welfare, so that there may be a more substantial measure of equality in moral and physical well-being among the people whom the men of Lincoln’s day kept…

Fundamentally, our chief problem may be summed up as the effort to make men, as nearly as they can be made, both free and equal; the freedom and equality necessarily resting on a basis of justice and brotherhood.

Our whole experiment is meaningless unless we are to make this a democracy in the fullest sense of the word, in the broadest as well as the highest and deepest significance of the word.

It must be made a democracy economically as well as politically.

It is our boast that in our political affairs we have combined genuine political equality with high distinction in individual service.

During a century and a third we here on this continent—more completely than anywhere else at any other time—have actually realized the democratic principle, the principle of popular government.

Yet during this period we have produced, in the persons of Washington and Lincoln, two leaders who on the roll of the world’s worthies stand higher than any other two men ever produced by any other country during a similar length of time.

We believe that it is entirely possible to combine equality of rights and at least an approximate equality in the opportunity to achieve material well-being, with the opportunity for the highest kind of individual distinction.

Hitherto our efforts towards this end have related to purely political matters; we must now strive to achieve the same end in economic matters.

To achieve our purpose we cannot trust merely to haphazard, easy-going methods with complete absence of official Government action and a too exclusively material standard.

We must be true to the spirit of our ancestors, and therefore we must avoid any servility to the letter of what they said and did.

There must be equal rights for all, and special privileges for none; but we must remember that to achieve this ideal it is necessary to construe rights and privileges very differently from the way they were necessarily construed, by…

We must strive to achieve our ideal by an exercise of governmental power which the conditions did not render necessary a century ago, and of which our forefathers would have felt suspicious.