AUGUST, 1920

America's Gift to Britain.

Senator Root presents Statue of Abraham Lincoln.

The Speeches at Central Hall.

THE proceedings in connection with the Inauguration of the St. Gaudens statue of Abraham Lincoln on July 28th, 1920, commenced with a Public Meeting in Central Hall, Westminster, at 3 p.m.

Viscount Bryce, O.M. (Deputy-President of the AngloAmerican Society) presided, and was supported on his right by Senator Elihu Root, Lord Weardale, Mr. John W. Davis, Lady Geddes (wife of the British Ambassador in Washington) and Sir John Henry; and on his left by the Prime Minister (the Rt. Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P.), the American Ambassador (the Hon. John W. Davis), and Bishop Darlington, Bishop of Harrisburg, U.S.A. Amongst the large and distinguished audience were the Staff of the American Embassy; Consul General and Mrs. Skinner and the Staff of the American Consulate General, the Earl of Reading, Sir Donald Maclean, the Home Secretary, the Postmaster-General, the Minister of Agriculture and Lady Lee of Fareham, Earl and Countess Beatty, the Lord Mayor of London, the Mayor of Westminster (Viscount Doneraile), the First Commissioner of Works and Lady Mond, President Lowell (of Harvard, U.S.A.) and Mrs. Lowell, the Bishop of Virginia, Bishop Brewster (U.S.A.), the High Commissioners of the Dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Viscountess Bryce, the Rt. Hon. Augustine Birrell, the Rt. Hon. Reginald McKenna, the Rt. Hon. Walter Runciman, Viscount Cowdray, Lord Phillimore, Colonel and Mrs. House, the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, General Seely, Lord Glenconner, Lord Cave, Lord Swaythling, Lord Aberconway, the Earl of Kintore, Sir Charles Wakefield, Bt. (Hon. Treasurer, AngloAmerican Society), Sir George Paish, Sir Sidney Lee, Sir Robert Perks, Major David Davies, M.P., Dr. Macnamara, M.P., Mr. Kellaway, M.P., Lord Inverforth, Archdeacon Carnegie (St. Margaret's, Westminster) and Mrs. Carnegie, Mrs. Woodhull Martin, Sir Hamo Thorneycroft, R.A., Sir George Frampton, R.A., the Rev. R. J. Campbell, the Rev. Dr. John Clifford, Mr. Martin Vogel, Lord Desborough, Mr. J. L. Garvin, Sir Philip Sassoon, M.P., Mr. J. B. Macafee, Mr. Gordon Selfridge, Colonel Edwards, D.S.O., the Secretary of the Pilgrims (Mr. Wilson Taylor), the Secretary of the Anglo-American Society (Mr. H. S. Perris), and many others.

Opening the proceedings, the Chairman (Viscount Bryce) said:-There is no man. in America better fitted to address a British

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audience on an occasion of this kind than Mr. Root. (Cheers.) He grew up when the deeds and the character of Lincoln were fresh in the memory of all his countrymen. He has long been in the front rank of American statesmen, and, if I may venture to express what I believe to be the general feeling in America, America looks upon him as the greatest Secretary of State it has had since Daniel Webster. (Cheers.) It was my good fortune to have to negotiate with him in Washington not a few treaties between our two countries, and I have never known in either hemisphere anyone with a wider range of vision or with a mind more fair and just in handling diplomatic questions. He always showed the sincerest wish for perfect concord and friendly cooperation between our two great countries. (Cheers.) With such a man it was a pleasure to negotiate, and to listen to such a man is a privilege. May I now express some of the feelings which led us to-day to erect here, far from his own land, that monument of the great President which we owe American generosity. Three hundred years ago in this coming winter a tiny band of Englishmen settled on the coast of Massachusetts Bay, just as thirteen years before that another band had settled on the coast of Virginia. We are commemorating this year the settlement of that Pilgrim band on Massachusetts Bay. Ever since then the ancient English people has been divided into two branches, but, despite distance and climate and political separation, these two branches have remained one in habits and ideas and beliefs, and the bed-rock of character is still the same in both. (Cheers.)

owe to

Lincoln's parents were born British subjects, and in 1809, his birth year-the birth year also of Tennyson and Gladstone-the American people were still almost wholly of British race, and Lincoln grew up under the influence of the traditions which the whole race possessed in common. He educated himself on the Bible and Shakespeare. He was one of those who expand and ennoble the old traditions, and hand them

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on, bright with fresh lustre, to the generations that follow. Thus, thinking of Lincoln as belonging to both branches of the old stock, we wish to commemorate him here among the great ones of Britain. No spot in Britain is so fit. In and around Parliament Square stand the sculptured figures of many of the most illustrious Englishmen -some under the open vault of heaven, some in the venerable Abbey, rich with solemn and pathetic memories, and some in the halls of Parliament itself-illustrious figures from the days of Hampden and

[Copyright, Anglo-American Society.

SIDE VIEW OF STATUE, SHOWING
HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT.

Cromwell down to the days of Canning, Peel, Disraeli, and Gladstone. Placing here in such company the statue of Lincoln, we honour him for what he did and for the meaning which his life has had for our country, for our common English stock, and for the world. (Cheers.) He brought his nation through the greatest perils it had ever encountered, and he left behind him a record of patient wisdom and a stainless life. To us he stands as a model of that uprightness and loyalty and truth, that steadfastness and courage which men of

AUGUST, 1920

British stock have so often displayed in war and in peace.

So we may think of him as being a type of whatever virtues the stock possesses. He is ours almost as much as he is America's

(cheers)—and to both nations he is a pledge of brotherhood and friendship. Cheers.) We commemorate him also as a hero who belonged to the whole world, because he showed what fame may be won and what services be rendered by a plain son of the people unaided by any gifts of fortune. His life and his character rise like a beacon light of hope to us all in these dark days of strife and confusion. Here in the midst of our great Englishmen let this great American stand, majestic in his simplicity, a witness to what one indomitable will-bent on high aims, always hopeful because inspired by faith in freedom and in the people whence he sprang-could achieve for all mankind. (Loud cheers.)

Rising amidst loud and general cheers, to make his Presentation Address, Mr. Root said:

By authority of His Majesty's Government, a statue of an American has been set up in the Canning Enclosure-where, on one side, Westminster Abbey and, on another, the Houses of Parliament look down upon it; where it is surrounded by memorials of British statesmen whose lives are inseparable parts in the history of the Kingdom and of the Empire; and where the living tides of London will ebb and flow about it. The statue is the work of Augustus St. Gaudens, son of a French father, native of Ireland, and greatest of American sculptors (cheers). The American commemorated is Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States. On behalf of the American donors I now formally present the statue to the British people. (Loud cheers.)

Abraham Lincoln was born on the 12th of February, III years ago, in a log cabin among the mountains of the State of Kentucky. He came into a frontier life of comparative poverty, labour, hardship and rude adventure. He had little instruction

AUGUST, 1920

and few books. He had no friends among the great and powerful of his time. An equal among equals in the crude simplicity

of scattered communities on the borders of the wilderness, he rose above the common level by force of his own qualities. He was sent by his neighbours to the State Legislature, where he learned the rudiments of government. He was sent to the Congress at Washington, where he broadened his conceptions to national scope. He was admitted to the bar and won high place as a successful and distinguished advocate. He became convinced of the wickedness of African slavery, that baleful institution which the defective humanity of our fathers permitted to be established in the American Colonies. He declared his conviction that slavery was eternally wrong with power and insistence that compelled public attention. He gave voice to the awakened conscience of the North. He led in the struggle for freedom against slavery. Upon that issue he was elected President. In that cause, as President, he conducted a great war of four years' duration in which millions of armed men were engaged. When in his wise judgment the time was ripe for it, then upon his own responsibility, in the exercise of his authority as Commander-inChief, invoking the support of his country, the considerate judgment of mankind, and the blessing of God upon his act, he set free the 3,000,000 slaves by his official proclamation and dedicated the soil of America for ever as the home of a united liberty-loving Commonwealth. (Loud cheers.)

The act was accepted; it was effective; African slavery was ended; the war was won-for union and for freedom; and in the very hour of victory, the great emancipator fell at the hand of a crazed fanatic.

It was not chance or favourable circumstance that achieved Lincoln's success. The struggle was long and desperate and often appeared hopeless. He won through the possession of the noblest qualities of manhood. He was simple, honest, sincere, and unselfish. He had high courage for

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