Four score and seven years ago the fathers 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 so dedicated, can long endure, people met 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. The living therefore were called to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work so nobly 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.