have your
children rise up and call you blessed, spare not the enemy! Over the
hills, out of the earth, down from the clouds, pour in resistless might!
Fire from every rock and tree, from door and window, from hearth-stone
and chamber; hang upon his flank and rear from morn to sunset, and so
through a land blazing with holy indignation, hurl the hordes of
ignorance and corruption and injustice back, back in utter defeat and
ruin.

A MORE PERFECT UNION[47]

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS

Upon this field consecrated by American valor we meet to consecrate
ourselves to American union. In this hallowed ground lie buried, not
only brave soldiers of the blue and the gray, but the passions of war,
the jealousies of sections, and the bitter root of all our national
differences, human slavery. Here long and angry controversies of
political dogma, of material interest, and of local pride and tradition,
came to their decisive struggle. As the fate of Christendom was
determined at Tours, that of American Independence at Saratoga, and that
of modern Europe at Waterloo, the destiny of the American Union was
decided at Gettysburg. A hundred other famous fields there are of the
same American bravery in the same tremendous strife; fields whose proud
and terrible tale history and song will never tire of telling. But it is
here that the struggle touched its highest point. Here broke the fiery
crest of that invading wave of war.

This is one of the historic fields of the world, and to us Americans no
other has an interest so profound. Marathon and Arbela, Worcester and
Valmy, even our own Bunker Hill and Saratoga and Yorktown, fields of
undying fame, have not for us a significance so vital and so beneficent
as this field of Gettysburg. Around its chief and central interest
gather associations of felicitous significance. Like the House of
Delegates in Williamsburg, where Patrick Henry roused Virginia to
resistance; like Faneuil Hall in Boston, where Samuel Adams lifted New
England to independence; like Carpenter's Hall in Philadelphia, where
the Continental Congress assembled, this field is invested with the
undying charm of famous words fitly spoken. While yet the echoes of the
battle might have seemed to linger in the awed and grieving air, stood
the sad and patient and devoted man, whose burden was greater than that
of any man of his generation, and as greatly borne as any solemn
responsibility in human history. Upon this field he