THE VENGEANCE OF THE FLAG *

ABRAHAM LINCOLN was born of a wonderful mother, of whom the world knows, alas, too little. Nancy Hanks!

I know not what furtive, haunting suggestiveness there is in this name of piquant pride and girlish coquetry. But whatever buoyant song her soul might have sung under happier skies, that gentle soul was all too sensitive to the hard conditions of her environment. She drooped, and the rosy cheeks grew wan, and the great, soft eyes were troubled in their depths, and the eager, questioning mind was numbed by the riddle of her life and the burden of its sorrows. If the wind laughed in the sun, it sobbed in the night. If the spirits of the forest whispered hope, they sometimes shrieked despair. If the clouds, like water fowl, rested on the bosom of her woodland pools, they also hung like shadows above her brooding heart. And so the moaning of the wind, and the shadows of the clouds, and the boding spirits of the earth and sky, and the mystery, and pathos, and tragedy of life passed into her nature and became part of it; and into the nature of Abraham, her son, sole heir to her tenderness, her wistfulness, her destiny.

It has been said that in every great man there is

* Delivered at the Washington Day banquet of the Union League Club, Chicago, February 22, 1893.

something of the child, and I would add: Yes, and of ✓ the woman. Napoleon was not great-he was monstrous. True greatness has in it a depth of tenderness and a well-spring of melancholy, through which there may bubble up betimes an iridescent humor. Lincoln could catch the rainbow colors of a joke even through the prism of his tears. A great man is a religious man. In his soul there is a mystery of love, too vague to limit by a theology. Lincoln's religion was a creedless Christianity.

His physique, his strength-like the strength of a gorilla-his physical attributes were inherited from his father, but his soul was given him by his mother, who, dowered with no earthly thing, gave all that she had of heaven-her motherhood, herself. "All that I am," said Abraham Lincoln, "I owe to my mother."

Now, Prof. Drummond in that great book of his, called "The Ascent of Man," has taught us the holy sanction of that word-mother. He has revealed to us how all the forces of the universe, through countless ages and millenniums, have conspired and aspired to produce this final, crowning miracle of God-the miracle of motherhood. Mother! Handmaid of God -elect of heaven! Not even to an angel is vouchsafed the care of life new made; you, you only are deemed worthy of the charge! Not cherubim nor seraphim may nurse a human soul; a mother's heart cradles man's first and only innocence!

This month, February, fellow-citizens, is an American holy month, for in it were born Washington and Lincoln-two names so blended in popular affection that to mention one is to recall the other.

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ington, the patrician, whose mind and heart, like the cups of a chemist's balance, seemed to weigh each other, to whom religion was a rule of action, a divine command;-Lincoln, the plebeian, whose mind and heart had been fused in the crucible of love, with whom religion was a passionate intuition. Of these twins of destiny I have chosen (I hope not inappropriately to the occasion) to speak of Lincoln—to relate the manner of his death, and the vengeance of the flag.

Was it, my friends, an inspiration or caprice when, on the very threshold of that most sober, somber, sullen story of colonial life, "The Scarlet Letter," Hawthorne suddenly stoops, and plucking a rose that grew beside the prison door presents it to his reader? It was a graceful act, a propitiatory act, and withal an act of deep significance. For somehow the perfume of the flower pervades the entire story, so when at last you close the book, with the mist still in your eyes, and fain would murmur, "a sad, cruel, useless sacrifice," lo! the fragrance of that rose, like an exhalation from an unseen altar, breathes through your spirit and you sigh instead, "perhaps after all 'twas bestperhaps 'twas necessary."

With something of the motive I have attributed to Hawthorne I wish to relate an incident that befell me in this city, as a prelude to my recital of the darkest page in American history. It was in Lincoln Park. The statue of liberty's great martyr had recently been unveiled, and I had come to study it. To my mind, unskilled in the niceties of criticism, the work seemed perfect. The dear, homely, lovely face with its wil

derness of wrinkles, those hieroglyphs of character; the tall, angular, awkward figure to which the garments clung hopeless of adaptation-ecce homo! behold our kingly rail-splitter! himself a sort of human rail, cleft from a genealogical tree as yet uncatalogued, sound to the core, with the bark still on, and all the splinters left as God had left them! It was Abraham Lincoln as I had dreamed of him in boyhood, as I had read of him in history; simple, majestic, actual, as if his immortal spirit had clothed itself in a vestment of immortal bronze. There, in the restful quiet of a park already dedicated to his memory-a nodal point among the mighty vibrations of a great city-a little continent bounded by the "unsalted sea " called Michigan, and the vast ocean of life called Chicago there amidst the green twilight of arching trees and whispering leaves, towered the beloved form of Liberty's Messiah!

As I lowered my eyes to trace the words embossed upon the pedestal (the words of that short speech destined to live so long, at once the episode and the epitaph of Gettysburg) I became aware of an old gentleman who stood gazing up into the dark benignant face that bent above us. He was a quaint old man; lusty, thick-set, smooth-shaven, wearing a widebrimmed felt hat and a homespun costume, neat enough but far from fashionable. His bright, ruddy face glowed from out its snowdrift of white hair like a live coal among its ashes. There was certainly nothing in his physiognomy to suggest melancholy, and yet, as he gazed, the tears streamed down his cheeks unheeded.

The spectacle touched my sympathies and roused my curiosity as well. With perhaps unpardonable rudeness I attempted to discover the secret of his perturbation. I ventured to ask if, in his opinion, the statue before us was a good likeness of Mr. Lincoln. He replied simply: "I presume it is; I never met him."

"And yet," I persisted, "the contemplation of the statue seems to affect you singularly?"

The old gentleman turned to me impressively and said: "Young man, I am a Kentuckian, born and reared and hoping to die in the old Blue Grass Commonwealth. If Kentucky had left the Union, I should have followed and fought for her. All through those frightful years and for long years afterward I looked upon President Lincoln as a tyrant and a despot, and when the news came of his taking-off I flung up my hat and echoed the yell of the assassin-Sic semper tyrannis!' Not until recent years have I come to realize that Abraham Lincoln was the best, the truest friend that the South or humanity has ever had. And now," continued the old fellow, his eyes again glistening with tears, "now I can never think of him, never hear the mention of his name, that my heart does not well within me and overflow my eyes."

I had already seized his hand and was wringing it in both of mine. "Sir," I cried, "if what you feel is the true disposition of Kentucky, I swear to you I voice the sentiment of Nebraska when I say that, in the name of Lincoln, we are once more and forever friends. God bless you-brother!"