Many many years ago our parents brought forth on this planet two new lives, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men and women are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great love, testing whether this love or any loves so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great river of love, called the river of no return. We have come to dedicate a portion of that river as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that love 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 river. The brave men and women, 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 I say here, but it can never forget what you did here. It is for us the ones still in love 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 pioneers we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these pioneers shall not have parted in vain, that this two lives under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that our family of you, by you, for you shall not perish from the earth.
