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 United States was engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, could long endure. On a great battlefield of that war, a portion of the field was being dedicated 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. What endured was not the words spoken there, but what those soldiers had done. The living therefore were called to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought, to take increased devotion from the honored dead, to resolve that the dead would not have died in vain, that the nation under God would have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people would not perish from the earth.