Four score and seven years after the nation was brought forth on this continent in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, the Civil War tested whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, could long endure. At a great battlefield of that war, a portion of the field was set apart as a final resting place for those who gave their lives so 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. The enduring duty of the living was to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought, to take increased devotion from the honored dead, and to resolve that they should not have died in vain, that the nation should have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth.