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- Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty
- and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, test-
- ing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great
- battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who
- here have given their lives that the nation 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 ground. The brave men,
- living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will
- little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living
- rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus so nobly advanced.
- 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."
-