MANIERRE.
PREFACE
This edition of Mr. Lincoln's address has been prepared and published by
the Young Men's Republican Union of New York, to exemplify its wisdom,
truthfulness, and learning. No one who has not actually attempted to
verify its details can understand the patient research and historical
labor which it embodies. The history of our earlier politics is
scattered through numerous journals, statutes, pamphlets, and letters;
and these are defective in completeness and accuracy of statement, and
in indices and tables of contents. Neither can any one who has not
travelled over this precise ground appreciate the accuracy of every
trivial detail, or the self-denying impartiality with which Mr. Lincoln
has turned from the testimony of "the Fathers," on the general question
of slavery, to present the single question which he discusses. From the
first line to the last--from his premises to his conclusion, he travels
with swift, unerring directness which no logician ever excelled--an
argument complete and full, without the affectation of learning, and
without the stiffness which usually accompanies dates and details. A
single, easy, simple sentence of plain Anglo-Saxon words contains a
chapter of history that, in some instances, has taken days of labor to
verify and which must have cost the author months of investigation to
acquire.
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