Good morning, Whitewater
The National Weather Service predicts today will be mostly cloudy with a high of 59 degrees. The Farmers’ Almanac predicts today will be “wet, especially over the Great Lakes.”
Yesterday’s better prediction: NWS — greater detail trumps a vague long-range forecast written a year ago.
A Canned Food Drive continues in our school district today.
In Wisconsin history on this date, in 1859, as reported at the website of the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Abraham Lincoln visited and spoke in Wisconsin:
On this date Abraham Lincoln delivered an address at the Wisconsin State Fair. In his speech, he connected agriculture to education: “Every blade of grass is a study; and to produce two, where there was but one, is both a profit and a pleasure.” The rising political star (who was elected the following year), also stressed the importance of free labor. This was Lincoln’s last visit to Wisconsin. In 1861, after winning the presidential election, Lincoln signed the bill establishing the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The final lines of Lincoln’s address in Wisconsin are cautionary yet hopeful:
It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.”
How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! — how consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.”
And yet let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.