He had no special
gift or quality to distinguish him; he was simply the best type of
American at a historic juncture when the national safety wanted such
a man. The confidence which all Americans express that their country
will be equal to any emergency which may threaten it, is not so
entirely superstitious as it seems at first sight. For the career of
Lincoln shows how it has been done in a country where the "necessary
man" can be drawn not from a few leading families, or an educated
class, but from the millions.
Rabbi Schechter, in an eloquent address delivered at the Centennial
celebration, speaks of Lincoln's personality as follows:
The half century that has elapsed since Lincoln's death has
dispelled the mists that encompassed him on earth. Men now not only
recognise the right which he championed, but behold in him the
standard of righteousness, of liberty, of conciliation, and truth.
In him, as it were personified, stands the Union, all that is best
and noblest and enduring in its principles in which he devoutly
believed and served mightily to save. When to-day, the world
celebrates the century of his existence, he has become the ideal of
both North and South, of a common country, composed not only of the
factions that once confronted each other in war's dreadful array,
but of the myriad thousands that have since found in the American
nation the hope of the future and the refuge from age-entrenched
wrong and absolutism.
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