But do we deem the Nation complete and finished? These venerable men
crowding here to this famous field have set us a great example of
devotion and utter sacrifice. They were willing to die that the people
might live. But their task is done. Their day is turned into evening.
They look to us to perfect what they established. Their work is handed
on to us, to be done in another way, but not in another spirit. Our day
is not over; it is upon us in full tide.

Have affairs paused? Does the Nation stand still? Is what the fifty
years have wrought since those days of battle finished, rounded out, and
completed? Here is a great people, great with every force that has ever
beaten in the lifeblood of mankind. And it is secure. There is no one
within its borders, there is no power among the nations of the earth, to
make it afraid. But has it yet squared itself with its own great
standards set up at its birth, when it made that first noble, naïve
appeal to the moral judgment of mankind to take notice that a government
had now at last been established which was to serve men, not masters? It
is secure in everything except the satisfaction that its life is right,
adjusted to the uttermost to the standards of righteousness and
humanity. The days of sacrifice and cleansing are not closed. We have
harder things to do than were done in the heroic days of war, because
harder to see clearly, requiring more vision, more calm balance of
judgment, a more candid searching of the very springs of right.

Look around you upon the field of Gettysburg! Picture the array, the
fierce heats and agony of battle, column hurled against column, battery
bellowing to battery! Valor? Yes! Greater no man shall see in war; and
self-sacrifice, and loss to the uttermost; the high recklessness of
exalted devotion which does not count the cost. We are made by these
tragic, epic things to know what it costs to make a nation--the blood