A Letter - Page 2

wisdom as it glowed
upon the story; how you found in Lincoln's words a prophecy of the great
struggle that has come. Since I have been steering my imagination on its
swift, long flights into the past I have been able to recall the very
words you used: "Lincoln said that a house divided against itself must
fall--that our nation could not endure part slave and part free, and it
was true. Since then the world has grown incredibly small. The peoples of
the earth have been drawn into one house and the affairs of each are the
concern of all. With a vain, boastful and unscrupulous degenerate on the
throne of Germany, it is likely to be a house divided against itself and
I fear a greater struggle than the world has ever seen between the bond
and the free. It will be a bloody contest but of its issue there can be
no doubt because the friends of freedom are the children of light and are
many. They will lay all they have upon its altars. They will be
unprepared and roughly handled for a time but their reserves of material
and moral strength which shall express themselves in ready sacrifice, are
beyond all calculation. Only one whose life spans the wide area from
Andrew Jackson to Woodrow Wilson and who has stood with Lincoln in his
lonely tower and watched the flowing of the tides for three score years
and ten, as I have, can be quite aware of the perils and resources of
Democracy."

All these and many other things which you have said to me, dear
grandfather, have helped me to understand this great thunderous drama in
which I have had a part. They have helped me to endure its perils and
bitter defeats. It was you who saw clearly from the first that this was
the final clash between the bond and the free--an effort of the great
house of God to purge itself, and you urged me to go to Canada and enlist
in the struggle. For this, too, I thank you. My wounds are dear to me,
knowing, as you have made me know, that I have come well by them fighting
not in the interest of Great Britain or France or Russia, but in the
cause of humanity. It is strange that among these men who are fighting
with me I have found only one or two who seem to have a vision of the
whole truth of this business.

Now I come to the point of my letter. I have an enlistment to urge upon
you in the cause of humanity and there are no wounds to go with it. When
I come home, as I shall be doing as soon as I am sufficiently mended, we
must go to work on the story of your life so that all who wish to do so
may know it as I know it. Let us go to it with all the diaries that you
and your father kept, aided by your memory, and give to the world its
first full view of the heart and soul of Lincoln. I have read all the
biographies and anecdotes of him