say that any one day was the finest day in the year, or any piece of scenery the finest in this or that continent. Three speeches, however, in the English language have always appeared to me to emerge with a superiority which, if not indisputable, will perhaps not be seriously disputed—much in the same way as the Funeral Oration of Pericles was generally allowed to be the masterpiece of the ancient world. Two of them just fall within the period that we have passed in review, but were not made in England or by an Englishman. The third was made or is said to have been made (because there is some doubt as to the actual words) by an Englishman half a century earlier.
William Pitt.Ten weeks before Pitt died, his health was drunk at the Lord Mayor's Dinner, after the victory of Trafalgar, as the Saviour of Europe. The dying man responded in these memorable and immortal terms:
"I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me. But Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example."
Abraham Lincoln.Abraham Lincoln was the author of both the other speeches. Everyone knows them, they are part of the intellectual patrimony of the English-speaking race. But they may once again admit of repetition here, as a model and an inspiration. At the Gettysburg Cemetery on November 19th, 1863, he thus spoke:
"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 fit and proper that we should do this.
"But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot 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 so far nobly advanced. It is rather for us
