Four score and seven years after the founding of a new nation on this continent, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, the country was engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, could long endure. On 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 that the nation might live. Yet the ground had already been consecrated by the brave men, living and dead, who struggled there, beyond any power to add or detract. The living were called instead to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought there, to take increased devotion from the honored dead, to resolve that these dead should not have died in vain, that the nation, under God, 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.