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President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
November 18, 1863
Four score and seven years
ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all
men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and
so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field
as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper
that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The
brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will
little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather
to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us
to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that
cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died
in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for
the people shall not perish from the earth.
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