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 United States faced a great civil war testing whether such a nation could long endure. On a great battlefield of that war, part of the field was being dedicated 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 power of words by the brave men, living and dead, who struggled there. The living were called instead to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work advanced by those who fought, to take increased devotion from the honored dead, to resolve that they had not died in vain, and to seek a new birth of freedom so that government of the people, by the people, for the people, would not perish from the earth.