It’s Lincoln’s birthday today, and it offers us the moment to consider that singularly great man. The true advocate of freedom respects and admires Lincoln. (See, for example, Timothy Sandefur’s Liberty and Union, Now and Forever.)
Lincoln visited Wisconsin, and delivered a speech before our agricultural society in September of 1859. The speech addressed particular topics of interest to its audience, but ended with an observation that’s both haunting and 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.