Four score and seven years ago, the nation's founders brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. During a great civil war testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure, people gathered on a great battlefield to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so that the nation might live. Yet the ground had already been consecrated beyond any added power by the brave men, living and dead, who struggled there, and the lasting duty of the living was to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work, to increased devotion to the cause for which the honored dead gave the last full measure of devotion, so that those dead would not have died in vain, the nation would have a new birth of freedom, and government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.