For honor lost an' dear ones wasted,
But proud, to meet a people proud,
With eyes thet tell o' triumph tasted!

Come, with han' grippin' on the hilt,
An' step that proves ye Victory's daughter!
Longin' for you, our sperits wilt
Like shipwrecked men's on raf's for water.

Come, while our country feels the lift
Of a gret instinct shoutin' "Forwards!"
An' knows thet freedom ain't a gift
Thet tarries long in han's o' cowards!
Come, sech ez mothers prayed for, when
They kissed their cross with lips thet quivered,
An' bring fair wages for brave men,
A nation saved, a race delivered.

With Grant and Lee locked in the last desperate struggle at Petersburg,
with final victory almost in sight, Lincoln spoke his second
inaugural,--too grave for exultation, with the note of humility and
faith. He is awed before the course of events since he stood there four
years ago. He feels the strangeness of both combatants appealing to the
same Bible and the same God. For himself and his people he utters the
fond hope, the fervent prayer, that "this awful scourge of war may pass
away." He accepts the suffering as the penalty of the nation--the whole
nation--for the sin of slavery. Humbly, resolutely, he faces with his
people the final effort, the sacred duty: "With malice toward none, with
charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the
right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the
nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for
his widow and his orphan, and to all which may achieve and cherish a
just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

CHAPTER XXVIII

RECONSTRUCTION: EXPERIMENTS AND IDEALS

"God uses a good many ugly tools to dig up the stumps and burn off the
forests and drain the swamps of a howling wilderness. He has used this
old Egyptian plow of slavery to turn over the sod of these fifteen
Southern States. Its sin consisted in not dying decently when its work
was done. It strove to live and make all the new world like it. Its
leaders avowed that their object was to put this belt of the continent
under the control of an aristocracy which believes that one-fifth of the
race is born booted and spurred and the other four-fifths ready for that
fifth to ride. The war was one of freedom and democracy against the
institutions that rest on slaves. It will take ten years for the country
to shed