![]() ".It is, Sir, the people's Constitution, the people's Government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people. Or politician Daniel Webster, who in a speech to the Senate in 1830 said: ".all power is a trust that we are accountable for its exercise that from the people and for the people all springs, and all must exist." Parker might have heard the expression from others such as British politician Benjamin Disraeli who expressed the sentiment in Vivian Grey (1826): ".There is what I call the American idea.This idea demands, as the proximate organization thereof, a democracy, that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people of course, a government after the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom." ![]() For example, in an 1850 speech to a New England Anti-Slavery Convention, Theodore Parker, an American preacher and social reformer, declared: 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.īut Lincoln did not originate the expression. 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. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. ![]() The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. ![]() But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate-we can not consecrate-we can not hallow-this ground. Most readers will be aware of this phrase from President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address in November 1863: ![]()
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