Title: Abraham Lincoln : The Abbotsford Silent Reading Lessons
Author: Roosevelt, Theodore, Wilson, Woodrow
Language: English
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  THE ABBOTTSFORD
  SILENT READING LESSONS


  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  No. 3



Abbottsford Series of Readers

FOR SUPPLEMENTARY WORK


  Four Letters of Pliny the Roman
  Lots of 25, $1.25; Postage 7c

  The Ancient Mariner, With Notes
  Lots of 25, $2.25; Postage 11c

  Abraham Lincoln
  Lots of 25, $1.25; Postage 7c

  The Stone Autograph Album
  Lots of twenty-five, $2; Postage 7c


  Copyrighted, 1919
  WALTER A. ABBOTT
  Publisher
  1130 Mission Street
  South Pasadena, Cal.



ABRAHAM LINCOLN

By President Woodrow Wilson


Address by Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, on the
occasion of the acceptance by the War Department of a deed of gift to
the Nation by the Lincoln Farm Association of the Lincoln birthplace
farm at Hodgenville, Ky. Here, over the log cabin where Abraham Lincoln
was born, destined to preserve the Nation and to free the slave, a
grateful people have dedicated this memorial to unity, peace, and
brotherhood among these States.

       *       *       *       *       *

No more significant memorial could have been presented to the Nation
than this. It expresses so much of what is singular and noteworthy in
the history of the country; it suggests so many of the things that
we prize most highly in our life and in our system of government.
How eloquent this little house within this shrine is of the vigor of
democracy! There is nowhere in the land any home so remote, so humble,
that it may not contain the power of mind and heart and conscience to
which nations yield and history submits its processes. Nature pays no
tribute to aristocracy, subscribes to no creed of caste, renders fealty
to no monarch or master of any name or kind. Genius is no snob. It does
not run after titles or seek by preference the high circles of society.
It affects humble company as well as great. It pays no special tribute
to universities or learned societies or conventional standards of
greatness, but serenely chooses its own comrades, its own haunts, its
own cradle even, and its own life of adventure and of training. Here is
proof of it. This little hut was the cradle of one of the great sons of
men, a man of singular, delightful, vital genius who presently emerged
upon the great stage of the Nation’s history, gaunt, shy, ungainly, but
dominant and majestic, a natural ruler of men, himself inevitably the
central figure of the great plot. No man can explain this, but every
man can see how it demonstrates the vigor of democracy, where every
door is open, in every hamlet and countryside, in city and wilderness
alike, for the ruler to emerge when he will and claim his leadership
in the free life. Such are the authentic proofs of the validity and
vitality of democracy.

Here, no less, hides the mystery of democracy. Who shall guess this
secret of nature and providence and a free polity? Whatever the vigor
and vitality of the stock from which he sprang, its mere vigor and
soundness do not explain where this man got his great heart that seemed
to comprehend all mankind in its catholic and benignant sympathy, the
mind that sat enthroned behind those brooding, melancholy eyes, whose
vision swept many an horizon which those about him dreamed not of--that
mind that comprehended what he had never seen, and understood the
language of affairs with the ready ease of one to the manner born--or
that nature which seemed in its varied richness to be the familiar of
men of everyday life. This is the sacred mystery of democracy, that its
richest fruits spring up out of soils which no man has prepared and in
circumstances amidst which they are the least expected. This is a place
alike of mystery and of reassurance.

It is likely that in a society ordered otherwise than our own Lincoln
could not have found himself or the path of fame and power upon which
he walked serenely to his death. In this place it is right that we
should remind ourselves of the solid and striking facts upon which
our faith in democracy is founded. Many another man besides Lincoln
has served the Nation in its highest places of counsel and of action
whose origins were as humble as his. Though the greatest example of
the universal energy, richness, stimulation, and force of democracy,
he is only one example among many. The permeating and all-pervasive
virtue of the freedom which challenges us in America to make the most
of every gift and power we possess, every page of our history serves to
emphasize and illustrate. Standing here in this place, it seems almost
the whole of the stirring story.

Here Lincoln had his beginnings. Here the end and consummation of
that great life seems remote and a bit incredible. And yet there
was no break anywhere between beginning and end, no lack of natural
sequence anywhere. Nothing really incredible happened. Lincoln was
unaffectedly as much at home in the White House as he was here. Do
you share with me the feeling, I wonder, that he was permanently at
home nowhere? It seems to me that in the case of a man--I would rather
say of a spirit--like Lincoln the question where he was is of little
significance, that it is always what he was that really arrests our
thought and takes hold of our imagination. It is the spirit always
that is sovereign. Lincoln, like the rest of us, was put through the
discipline of the world--a very rough and exacting discipline for him,
an indispensable discipline for every man who would know what he is
about in the midst of the world’s affairs; but his spirit got only its
schooling there. It did not derive its character or its vision from the
experiences which brought it to its full revelation. The test of every
American must always be, not where he is, but what he is. That, also,
is of the essence of democracy, and is the moral of which this place is
most gravely expressive.

We would like to think of men like Lincoln and Washington as typical
Americans, but no man can be typical who is so unusual as these great
men were. It was typical of American life that it should produce such
men with supreme indifference as to the manner in which it produced
them, and as readily here in this hut as amidst the little circle of
cultivated gentlemen to whom Virginia owed so much in leadership and
example. And Lincoln and Washington were typical Americans in the use
they made of their genius. But there will be few such men at best, and
we will not look into the mystery of how and why they come. We will
only keep the door open for them always, and a hearty welcome--after we
have recognized them.

I have read many biographies of Lincoln; I have sought out with the
greatest interest the many intimate stories that are told of him, the
narratives of nearby friends, the sketches at close quarters, in which
those who had the privilege of being associated with him have tried
to depict for us the very man himself “in his habit as he lived”; but
I have nowhere found a real intimate of Lincoln’s. I nowhere get the
impression in any narrative or reminiscence that the writer had in fact
penetrated to the heart of his mystery, or that any man could penetrate
to the heart of it. That brooding spirit had no real familiars. I get
the impression that it never spoke out in complete self-revelation,
and that it could not reveal itself completely to anyone. It was a
very lonely spirit that looked out from underneath those shaggy brows
and comprehended men without fully communicating with them, as if, in
spite of all its genial efforts at comradeship, it dwelt apart, saw its
visions of duty where no man looked on. There is a very holy and very
terrible isolation for the conscience of every man who seeks to read
the destiny in affairs for others as well as for himself, for a nation
as well as for individuals. That privacy no man can intrude upon. That
lonely search of the spirit for the right perhaps no man can assist.
This strange child of the cabin kept company with invisible things,
was born into no intimacy but that of its own silently assembling and
deploying thoughts.

I have come here today, not to utter a eulogy on Lincoln; he stands in
need of none, but to endeavor to interpret the meaning of this gift to
the Nation of the place of his birth and origin. Is not this an altar
upon which we may forever keep alive the vestal fire of democracy
as upon a shrine at which some of the deepest and most sacred hopes
of mankind may from age to age be rekindled? For these hopes must
constantly be rekindled, and only those who live can rekindle them.
The only stuff that can retain the life-giving heat is the stuff of
living hearts. And the hopes of mankind cannot be kept alive by words
merely, by constitutions and doctrines of right and codes of liberty.
The object of democracy is to transmute these into the life and action
of society, the self-denial and self-sacrifice of heroic men and women
willing to make their lives an embodiment of right and service and
enlightened purpose. The commands of democracy are as imperative as
its privileges and opportunities are wide and generous. Its compulsion
is upon us. It will be great and lift a great light for the guidance
of the nations only if we are great and carry that light high for
the guidance of our own feet. We are not worthy to stand here unless
we ourselves be in deed and in truth real democrats and servants of
mankind, ready to give our very lives for the freedom and justice and
spiritual exaltation of the great Nation which shelters and nurtures
us.



ABRAHAM LINCOLN

By President Theodore Roosevelt


Address delivered by the President of the United States (1901-1909) at
the ceremony of the laying of the corner stone of the Lincoln Memorial,
at his birthplace, Hodgenville, Ky., Feb. 12, 1909.

       *       *       *       *       *

We have met here to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the birth
of one of the two greatest Americans; of one of the two or three
greatest men of the Nineteenth Century; of one of the greatest men
in the world’s history. This rail-splitter, this boy who passed his
ungainly youth in the dire poverty of the poorest of the frontier folk,
whose rise was by weary and painful labor, lived to lead his people
through the burning flames of a struggle from which the Nation emerged,
purified as by fire, born anew to a loftier life. After long years of
iron effort, and of failure that came more often than victory, he at
last rose to the leadership of the Republic, at the moment when that
leadership had become the stupendous world-task of the time. He grew
to know greatness, but never ease. Success came to him, but never
happiness, save that which springs from doing well a painful and a
vital task. Power was his, but not pleasure. The furrows deepened on
his brow, but his eyes were undimmed by either hate or fear. His gaunt
shoulders were bowed, but his steel thews never faltered as he bore
for a burden the destinies of his people. His great and tender heart
shrank from giving pain; and the task allotted him was to pour out like
water the life-blood of the young men, and to feel in his every fiber
the sorrow of the women. Disaster saddened but never dismayed him. As
the red years of war went by they found him ever doing his duty in the
present, ever facing the future with fearless front, high of heart, and
dauntless of soul. Unbroken by hatred, unshaken by scorn, he worked and
suffered for the people. Triumph was his at the last; and barely had he
tasted it before murder found him, and the kindly, patient, fearless
eyes were closed forever.

As a people we are indeed beyond measure fortunate in the characters
of the two greatest of our public men, Washington and Lincoln. Widely
though they differed in externals, the Virginia landed gentleman and
the Kentucky backwoodsman, they were alike in essentials, they were
alike in the great qualities which made each able to do service to
his nation and to all mankind, such as no other man of his generation
could or did render. Each had lofty ideals, but each in striving to
attain these lofty ideals was guided by the soundest common sense.
Each possessed inflexible courage in adversity, and a soul wholly
unspoiled by prosperity. Each possessed all the gentler virtues
commonly exhibited by good men who lack rugged strength of character.
Each possessed also all the strong qualities commonly exhibited by
those towering masters of mankind who have too often shown themselves
devoid of so much as the understanding of the words by which we signify
the qualities of duty, of mercy, of devotion to the right, of lofty
disinterestedness in battling for the good of others. There have been
other men as great and other men as good; but in all the history of
mankind there are no other two great men as good as these, no other two
good men as great. Widely though the problems of today differ from the
problems set for solution to Washington when he founded this Nation,
to Lincoln when he saved it and freed the slave, yet the qualities
they showed in meeting these problems are exactly the same as those we
should show in doing our work today.

Lincoln saw into the future with the prophetic imagination usually
vouchsafed only to the poet and the seer. He had in him all the lift
toward greatness of the visionary, without any of the visionary’s
fanaticism or egotism, without any of the visionary’s narrow jealousy
of the practical man and inability to strive in practical fashion for
the realization of an ideal. He had the practical man’s hard common
sense and willingness to adapt means to ends; but there was in him none
of that morbid growth of mind and soul which blinds so many practical
men to the higher things of life. No more practical man ever lived
than this homely backwoods idealist; but he had nothing in common with
those practical men whose consciences are warped until they fail to
distinguish between good and evil, fail to understand that strength,
ability, shrewdness, whether in the world of business or of politics,
only serve to make their possessor a more noxious, a more evil, member
of the community if they are not guided and controlled by a fine and
high moral sense.

We of this day must try to solve many social and industrial problems,
requiring to an especial degree the combination of indomitable
resolution with cool-headed sanity. We can profit by the way in which
Lincoln used both these traits as he strove for reform. We can learn
much of value from the very attacks which following that course brought
upon his head, attacks alike by the extremists of revolution and by the
extremists of reaction. He never wavered in devotion to his principles,
in his love for the Union, and in his abhorrence of slavery. Timid and
lukewarm people were always denouncing him because he was too extreme;
but as a matter of fact he never went to extremes, he worked step by
step; and because of this the extremists hated and denounced him with
a fervor which now seems to us fantastic in its deification of the
unreal and the impossible. At the very time when one side was holding
him up as the apostle of social revolution because he was against
slavery, the leading abolitionist denounced him as the “slave hound of
Illinois.” When he was the second time candidate for President, the
majority of his opponents attacked him because of what they termed his
extreme radicalism, while a minority threatened to bolt his nomination
because he was not radical enough. He had continually to check those
who wished to go forward too fast, at the very time that he overrode
the opposition of those who wished not to go forward at all. The goal
was never dim before his vision; but he picked his way cautiously,
without either halt or hurry, as he strode toward it, through such a
morass of difficulty that no man of less courage would have attempted
it, while it would surely have overwhelmed any man of judgment less
serene. Yet perhaps the most wonderful thing of all, and, from the
standpoint of the America of today and of the future, the most vitally
important, was the extraordinary way in which Lincoln could fight
valiantly against what he deemed wrong and yet preserve undiminished
his love and respect for the brother from whom he differed. In the hour
of a triumph that would have turned any weaker man’s head, in the heat
of a struggle which spurred many a good man to dreadful vindictiveness,
he said truthfully that so long as he had been in his office he had
never willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom, and besought his
supporters to study the incidents of the trial through which they were
passing as philosophy from which to learn wisdom and not as wrongs to
be avenged; ending with the solemn exhortation that, as the strife
was over, all should reunite in a common effort to save their common
country.

He lived in days that were great and terrible, when brother fought
against brother for what each sincerely deemed to be the right. In
a contest so grim the strong men who alone can carry it through are
rarely able to do justice to the deep convictions of those with whom
they grapple in mortal strife. At such times men see through a glass
darkly; to only the rarest and loftiest spirits is vouchsafed that
clear vision which gradually comes to all, even to the lesser, as the
struggle fades into distance, and wounds are forgotten, and peace
creeps back to the hearts that were hurt. But to Lincoln was given
this supreme vision. He did not hate the man from whom he differed.
Weakness was as foreign as wickedness to his strong, gentle nature;
but his courage was of a quality so high that it needed no bolstering
of dark passion. He saw clearly that the same high qualities, the same
courage, and willingness for self-sacrifice, and devotion to the right
as it was given them to see the right, belonged both to the men of the
North and to the men of the South. As the years roll by, and as all of
us, wherever we dwell, grow to feel an equal pride in the valor and
self-devotion, alike of the men who wore the blue and the men who wore
the gray, so this whole Nation will grow to feel a peculiar sense of
pride in the mightiest of the mighty men who mastered the mighty days;
the lover of his country and of all mankind; the man whose blood was
shed for the union of his people and for the freedom of a race, Abraham
Lincoln.


=To the Teacher=: These silent reading lessons differ radically in
three particulars from the lessons found in the usual school reader and
hence should be used to supplement the regular reading lessons rather
than to replace them:

 1. It is the aim of the series to provide material which is not
 easily accessible to most elementary school children, and yet which
 is of prime importance in extending their literary, geographical and
 historical horizons.

 2. This series provides for the maximum of self-activity on the part
 of the pupil with the minimum of effort on the part of the teacher.
 Indeed, these lessons will produce results in inverse proportion
 to the activity displayed by the teacher. Let the pupils have this
 booklet in their hands; read it; complete the required work outlined
 on the lessons, and conduct the class discussions with as little
 interference by the teacher as possible.

 3. But the best use that can be made of these lessons lies in their
 provision for the superior readers of the class, who quickly exhaust
 the possibilities of the _regular reading lesson_ and who have both
 the ability and the desire to attempt advanced work. It may be well
 to restrict the use of this material entirely to this advanced
 group, excusing the members of the group from a large part of the
 routine lessons. Such a procedure will place an incentive before the
 indifferent reader to improve his work, that will materially raise the
 standard of reading through the entire class.

=To the Pupil=: You have all seen a rock thrown into a quiet pond and
noticed how the impact of the rock on the water sent out little waves
of ever increasing size until they reached the margin of the pond. A
good reading lesson ought to do something of the same sort; it ought to
lead you on to read and think of many things, not only in the actual
reading lesson itself but of persons and places and events connected
with the lesson. A reading lesson which is read merely for the sake
of reading something is of little value to pupils of your grade; it
should build up in your thoughts pictures and memories which will be an
inspiration and a delight to you as long as you live. Most of you have
studied Wadsworth’s “Daffodils,” and will remember how the poet refers
to that “inward eye which is the bliss of solitude.” A fine reading
lesson should do just that; it should stock one’s mind with innumerable
pictures upon which “that inward eye” can feast at will.



EXERCISES


1. Note the three points of similarity in these addresses (1) both have
as their subject Abraham Lincoln (2) both were delivered at Lincoln’s
birthplace (3) both were delivered by Presidents of the United States.

2. Remembering that these addresses were prepared for listeners rather
than for readers, have the best oral reader in your class read the
addresses to you. Be sure to keep your booklets closed during the
reading.

3. Which address do you like best? Read both through carefully and
see if your opinion remains the same. Can you give reasons for your
preference?

4. Notice the forceful contrasts in Roosevelt’s first paragraph. Fill
the following blanks with appropriate words:

(a) “He grew to know ................. but never .............”

(b) “............... came to him, but never ............”

(c) “............... was his, but not ............”

(d) “His gaunt shoulders were ............. but his steel thews never
...............”

(e) “Disaster ............. but never ......... him.”

5. In what ways does Roosevelt say Washington and Lincoln differed? In
what ways were they alike? (Note that Wilson makes a similar contrast.)

6. Fill the following blanks: “There have been other men as ..........
and other men ...........; but in all the history of mankind there are
no other two ............. men as .............. as these, no other two
men as ...............”

7. What does Roosevelt say was the most wonderful thing about Lincoln?

8. Memorize “As the years roll by,” etc.

9. Read carefully the first paragraph of Wilson’s address. Put in your
own words his argument based on the phrase “Every man can see how it
demonstrates the vigor of democracy.”

10. Continuing the same idea, what does Wilson say is “the sacred
mystery of democracy”?

11. Explain the phrase “He walked serenely to his death.”

12. The paragraph beginning “I have read many biographies of Lincoln”
is very beautiful, and very difficult. Attempt to put the thought of
the paragraph into your own words, rewriting as many times as you find
it necessary.

13. Notice that both orators point out that the contemplation of
Lincoln’s life leads to better citizenship. Expand this idea in your
own words.


       *       *       *       *       *



Transcriber’s note


The following printer errors have been changed.

  =CHANGED  FROM                             TO=
  Page 2:   “right that we sould”            “right that we should”
  Page 2:   “bebtween beginning and end”     “between beginning and end”
  Page 3:   “experences which brought”       “experiences which brought”
  Page 4:   “as upon a shine”               “as upon a shrine”
  Page 4:   “rekindled? for these”           “rekindled? For these”
  Page 4:   “justice and spirtual”           “justice and spiritual”
  Page 5:   “when that leadersip”            “when that leadership”
  Page 6:   “practical man ever lives”       “practical man ever lived”
  Page 8:   “wickness to his strong”         “wickedness to his strong”
  Page 9:   “advance work. It may”           “advanced work. It may”




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